


we are our own disasters

by noharlembeat



Category: Batman (Comics), Batman - All Media Types, Grayson (Comics)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Mob, Damian is mostly the same, Dark Dick Grayson, Dark Jason Todd, Dark Tim Drake, Dom/sub, Loyalty Kink, M/M, No Nazis, Politics, Spycraft, Spyral (DCU), Unbetaed we die like mne
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-03
Updated: 2020-11-27
Packaged: 2021-03-09 06:01:53
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 25,826
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27360004
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/noharlembeat/pseuds/noharlembeat
Summary: Bruce Wayne, patriarch of the Wayne family and obsessively controlling head of the Wayne Crime Syndicate died. Now, three months later, Spyral has sent it's best agent to find out if this family is still holding Gotham together.Unfortunately, this family has other plans for Tiger.
Relationships: Dick Grayson/Jason Todd, Dick Grayson/Tiger, Dick Grayson/Tiger/Jason Todd, Tiger/Jason Todd
Comments: 35
Kudos: 113





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Walor](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Walor/gifts).



> No Hypnos tech because I'm too cool for it.
> 
> Multi-chapter, probably around 3 or 4.

The first time he meets one of the Wayne boys, it’s the smallest one. Damian is at best, a pain in the ass, and at worst, an abscess of a child, feral and infuriating, too quick with a sword, and utterly uncontrollable. Tiger lives, but it’s a near thing.

The second time he meets a Wayne boy, it’s the second youngest, at which point Tiger begins to wonder where Wayne farms them. Tim Drake-Wayne carries himself with the kind of poise that grown men aspire to, and holds back the kind of cruelty that Lex Luthor desires. Gotham city is where these Waynes live, but Tiger meets him in New York; he is surrounded by junior executives for the company he runs for his older brother. Tiger meets him in passing, and he’s dismissed both physically and, Tiger suspects, from the inside of Tim’s brains as nothing more than a flea on the back of a dog.

That suits Tiger just fine. The first Wayne boy tried to kill him, the second one thinks he’s useless, and in the end, both of them are pawns. Everyone knows that it’s the eldest - Richard Grayson-Wayne - who in theory runs the ship. Both his younger brothers are formidable, so the eldest, then, should be the one to crack.

He thought after the incident with Damian Wayne in Dubai, he could be forgiven from such work. First off, he tells Helena, he does not deal with _children_. He is too old, and Wayne’s children seem particularly inclined to kill him.

Helena, unsurprisingly, does not find this particularly forgiving. She tells him he is not that old, and tells him to pack his bags.

There is money coming into Gotham’s underworld that is impossible to track. That’s been true for years, but lately that money has seeped into things that impact the rest of the planet. Ostensibly, Gotham is a part of the United States. It’s a big city that was besieged by crime and corruption, until Bruce Wayne and Wayne Industries took merciless, unbending control. Then it became a big city that could be a powerhouse of a place, where every part of the city was bent to Bruce Wayne’s indomitable will, his obsession with control. It became a country in a city in a country.

Right up until three months ago.

Three months ago, Bruce Wayne died.

~~~~~

When he became a spy, he knew that the notion of glamour was only in movies. It helped that he didn’t really watch many movies; it helped even more that he had been conscripted straight out of a militia. He was a boy then, gangly still, sharp eyed, focused, devoted to Allah and loyal to no one. You do not survive Kandahar without that.

When he became a spy, he thought, aha. A life that may not be honest or honorable, but at least would be focused, driven. Would be for the betterment of others. Would serve the only creature that he was loyal to. Comfort was an illusion and self was a dream.

When he became a spy, it was not, in theory, to come to Gotham City in the middle of the coldest winter in the past generation to keep an eye on an underworld so notoriously corrupt that the underworld had an underworld, and to report back on the family that, rumor had it, ran both.

And he didn’t think he was going to do it like this.

The party is a very staid affair. Tiger has no idea how Helena got him an invitation - he suspects power brokering was involved, although knowing Helena, there was a good chance she just had someone killed and swiped their invitation. It is inside of Wayne Manor, but unlike the lavish parties in the ballroom, this one takes place in the old maze of sitting rooms and parlors designed to entertain generations of wealthy railroad barons and Mid-Atlantic elite. Everyone was dressed in something approaching black tie, only the women weren’t wearing pounds of jewelry. It was expensive. 

They were barely serving food.

Getting a meeting with Drake-Wayne, according to Helena, would have been simple. That would have involved base things, like money, and accounts, and business transactions. But going from one brother to the other was like playing a complex and convoluted game of chess, when they were playing backgammon, using rules designed for Chinese checkers. He could have met with Drake-Wayne and then never gotten further than a boardroom relationship, and no connection to Grayson-Wayne.

Richard, in fact, was so elusive that it was almost a joke. Tiger slips through the room with shocking grace, considering he hates suits and feels like he sticks out far too much in conversations where people have known each other since their parents grandparents were children. He goes over that elusiveness: Richard Grayson-Wayne, a playboy like his father, by all accounts a bit of an airhead, never particularly serious. The most Tiger knows about him is what’s published in the sorry rag they call a newspaper - the middling page six bullshit about donations to charity and whatever unfortunate celebrity he’s been seen canoodling with this week. Hates the press, loves photographers. Does not like business. 

That ends the list of facts, so Tiger slips into another room, another parlor of elite white idiots talking about how sad Wayne’s death was, how Gotham won’t be the same, how darling someone named Esme was in her tennis whites, and he thinks about the rumors. Rumors: Grayson-Wayne runs a club just on the other side of the Narrows, and does not pay protection money to either the Nightwings or the Red Hoods. Grayson-Wayne is the father to the child of one of the Kardashian sisters. Grayson-Wayne runs the Titans. Grayson-Wayne was asked to model but turned it down because he does not like the spotlight.

The rumors are just as useless as the facts, and Tiger decides that they are all absurd lies, except that he does own a club. Helena confirmed that Bruce Wayne did, in fact, throw about altogether baffling amounts of money to play the gangs off each other and to force the mob families to heel, like some convoluted game of chess. Giving his son who seems otherwise incapable of holding any job outside of “convenient family patriarch” a club seems like a way to throw a pawn behind a queen.

The club is, in fact, Tiger’s in. Spyral manufactured a stunning persona: a one Jasim Khan, out of Pakistan; nightclub manager who moved to Gotham recently from New York to be closer to family. The job was his with almost no effort at all; Helena knew people who knew people who knew people, who also knew people. The key is to always remain four or five contacts removed. 

He slips past a woman who is eyeing him like he is a cut of meat - _do not_ \- and into a hallway that he did not expect. Even Spyral’s vast resources could not get him a map of the interior of Wayne Manor, and this wing of the place is absurd to the point of architectural fever dreams.

He hears voices, and when he opens the door, someone says in the most exasperated tone Tiger can imagine, “can’t you sit in a chair like a normal person?”

The door creaks, because of course it does.

The room is one of those old, heavily furnished intimate libraries, with a fireplace large enough to house a child’s bedroom. Sitting on one of the massive leather chairs, his feet dangling off the arm as he stretches back over the other one, is Richard Grayson-Wayne. 

Tiger, did, in theory, come here to find this man, but he didn’t expect to see him like this, sitting in a chair that costs more money than Tiger could possibly make in a lifetime like he’s a child. For that fact alone, Tiger is staring.

Another fact: his eyes are so blue that it must be fake. Colored contacts. A trick of the light. That concussion he got in Dubai raising its head again. Richard is peering over the back of the chair.

“Ah-” Tiger begins, because he is a heavily trained intelligence operative.

Richard _smiles_.

Someone else moves. “You were supposed to lock the door, Robin,” Tiger, a man who is trained in always being aware of his surroundings, hears from someone sitting at the other chair, who Tiger didn’t see.

Richard waves his hand. “Nevermind,” he says to the person, who finally Tiger glances at. Oh.

_Oh._

It’s Jason Wayne, the last of Wayne’s boys. Where Damian is feral, Timothy public, and Richard elusive, Jason is practically non-existent. Spyral assumes that some of the larger, anonymous donations that come out of Gotham are Jason, but no one is sure. He has no social media. He has no known job, does not speak to the press, does not allow photographs of him to leak. For a while there was a rumor he was dead.

He’s not dead. 

He’s staring at Tiger with eyes just as blue as his brother; he has a very interesting scar that goes up the side of his face, and cuts one eyebrow in half. Where Richard is pretty, Jason is handsome. Together they could make grown men weep. It is very distracting.

Apparently, the silence lasts too long because Richard’s smile only gets wider. “Who are you?” he finally asks, coming over the back of the chair in a motion so smooth it looks impossible.

“Jasim Khan-” he starts, and stops. 

“Jasim Khan,” Richard purrs.

“Jasim Khan,” Jason says, flatly.

For some reason - possibly because despite everything in this scenario being bizarre - that one is the most jarring. Like a reminder that Tiger is here for a purpose. Tiger says, “I was here for the party.”

“The party’s in the other room,” Jason states, as though he’s speaking to an idiot.

“Bluejay,” Richard turns, “be nice.” He looks Tiger over. “He’s a guest.” Richard moves back into the room, and Tiger finds himself coming in, too, irritated at himself for letting himself get so easily distracted, and still willing to pursue this. Once he’s close enough, Richard offers a hand. “I’m Dick Grayson-Wayne,” he introduces himself. 

“My apologies for interrupting,” Tiger manages after a moment. He is the best of all of Helena’s operatives, and this should be simple. They are two men - dangerous men, but nothing more. “Although please accept my condolences for your loss.” Jasim, he decided, is a man of studied manners.

Richard’s mouth tightens; there is a complicated look on his face that is not so simple or so ordinary as _grief_. But the grief is there, too, obvious and thick. “That’s very kind,” he finally manages. “I don’t think I’ve even seen you in Gotham before,” he finally states, the most obvious thing of all.

“I’m newly arrived,” he replies. “I manage the Circus.”

That complicated look vanishes, and Richard’s eyes light up. “Oh,” he says, and that smile is back. “Do you like it?” he asks, leaning back on the chair. 

“You’ve got to be kidding,” Jason mutters. 

“Bluejay.”

“Robin,” Jason says back, but his tone is mocking. “You didn’t even know?”

Tiger actually, privately, agrees with Jason. What kind of idiot is he, that his club is being managed by someone new and he’s not even aware of it? The old manager quit to run the Iceberg Lounge, which was a far more high-paying position and didn’t involve potentially getting shot in the Narrows each night. But surely Richard knew that. He had to.

“You know I don’t always keep up,” Richard says with a smile and a wave of his hand. “Jasim,” he says, “I hope you’ll forgive me for ignoring your arrival. I actually do like to keep a hand in the running of the place. How about I come by tomorrow, and we have a conversation? I would love to get to know you better.”

In the grand scheme of things, this is excellent. This is what he was sent to Gotham to do - meet the Waynes, learn a little, determine the stability of their empire after their father’s death. Decide if there is a power vacuum or not. Report back. “I would be honored,” Tiger replies, gently, and exits the room. He recognizes a dismissal when he hears one.

~~~~

The Circus is a converted warehouse space; the kind of place any Gothamite would claw their own eyes out to get into. There was nothing so tacky and base as cage dancing; the performers were all on lyras and silk, at least twenty feet up, and above them was a seldom used high wire and trapeze. The colors were bright, the drinks were strong, the VIP section was filled to the brim with celebrities from around the world. 

Tiger hated every square inch of the place.

He was unconcerned with the legal liabilities of the performers, who were all excellent. In fact, the performers were the only thing about the place that Tiger could stand: they never came in inebriated, they did not sell drugs on the premises, they did not come in late. They warmed up and did their business and got paid and left without making Tiger so much as blink. They were, in other words, consummate professionals.

The _staff_ , on the other hand.

Grayson-Wayne favored pretty things, that much was clear the first second that he looked at the staff. Everyone was under the age of thirty, everyone was absurdly pretty, and Tiger was sure that combined, the five bartenders had an IQ of around fifteen. They took more pictures of themselves and each other in five minutes than Tiger had taken in his entire lifetime of _anything at all_. 

So every single one of those pretty, stupid children is now Tiger’s responsibility. Along with the cleaning staff, those poor underpaid souls, the DJs, who Tiger despises on principle, and the team of people whose job Tiger still doesn’t entirely understand but he’s been made aware are _critically important_. So. Protection, Tiger assumes.

Jasim is less annoyed by everything - Jasim is pragmatic to the core of him. Jasim lives in an apartment that is more flophouse than it is home, and Jasim has an ailing mother in Islamabad who he sends all his money to. Jasim does not care about the noise or the lights. Jasim, for Heaven’s sake, is proud of this nightmare place.

The staff, for reasons Tiger cannot fully comprehend, love Jasim.

The staff are also sycophantically obsessed with Grayson-Wayne. They talk about him in hushed, reverent tones, and sigh over him whenever they think they can get away with it. They wish, loudly and often, that he would spend more time at the Circus. When Jasim mentions he is coming by to have a chat, they all make ungodly noises, reassuring Jasim that Grayson-Wayne is “the best” and “super nice” and “you’ll love him”. When they find out that Jasim met him at Wayne Manor, they go into paroxysms of pure jealousy. 

Tiger thinks he will never understand anyone under the age of twenty five, and he’s already exhausted when Richard shows up, dressed in a conservative polo shirt and a pair of slacks. “Jasim!” he exclaims as he crosses the floor; Jasim is behind the bar, checking off the usual set of duties he’s assigning. The girls who do most of the serving are all clustered at the other end of the bar, watching them. “I’m so sorry I haven’t been by earlier,” Grayson-Wayne says as he sits on the other side of the bar, tipping his head into his hand, his elbow propped up on his leg, somehow, in some impossible yet not uncomfortable looking contortion of limbs.

“I don’t think you have to apologize,” Jasim replies. “What’s your drink?”

“Oh, just a beer, I think,” Richard says, and smiles this smile that makes him look rumpled, like he just got out of bed. 

Jasim pours the beer, and passes it over. “You should have one too,” Richard tells him brightly, and Jasim pours seltzer water, adds a lemon, and agrees to a toast.

Undercover work is best done like this. 

Tiger is: watching Richard’s movements, cataloging the way he flicks his hands. He’s noticing the way his eyes move when he speaks, when he talks about the Circus, about what he wants for it. He is carefully taking stock of every word to replay it later, to see if it is a lie, or the truth. Tiger is measuring how he holds his weight at the same time he’s listening for keywords like profit and durability and redefining the Narrows. Richard says Wayne Enterprises and Tiger hears I’m still involved. Tiger is irritated at the obvious and blatant display of wealth, at the way Richard is smiling at him like he’s stupid, or perhaps like he’s some kind of catch.

Jasim is: studiously making sure his boss’s drink is always half full, and when Richard waves off, he makes sure the glass of water is there for him. Jasim is not paying attention to any of the things Tiger cares about; Jasim is focused on the small talk of the conversation. Jasim is good at small talk, which is why Tiger learns that Richard wanted a circus theme because his friends from the circus where he grew up wanted more stable jobs. No one goes to the circus anymore, not with other, more exciting forms of entertainment available. Jasim tells Richard about his own childhood in Islamabad, Jasim tells him about coming to America as a young teenager, about staying after his mother returned home, about never finding a girl to marry. He says this with the grave sincerity that Tiger has learned he cannot throw away.

Tiger is not Jasim, and Jasim is not Tiger, but they borrow, one from the other. He is not like some of the other operatives, able to lie with their mouths and with their bodies. Tiger has discovered he can only do it convincingly with one, or the other, and so he chooses; his words may be lies, but his actions are still his own.

That’s why when he hears a crash, and turns to see one of the airheaded bartenders standing in a mess of broken glass, he bares his teeth. “It cannot be that there is nothing between your ears _and_ you have fat fingers,” he snarls, moving forward.

Richard is between them before Tiger gets there, though, having vaulted over the bar. “Hey,” he says, smiling at the girl, who for some reason that Tiger does not really understand, has burst into tears. “Don’t let the mean cat scare you. He’s still getting his legs under him.”

The girl’s lower lip wobbles, but she smiles, and goes to get a dustpan and a broom.

Richard stands, and turns. “You like things a certain way,” he says, which is interesting, but also a relief.

“I like things done right,” Jasim replies, Tiger receding.

“Well, we always can use more men like that,” Richard says, his eyes bright. He turns his head. “Duckling!” he exclaims.

“Robin,” Timothy replies; he still has his wool coat on, his scarf, his gloves. He’s pink with cold as the door shuts behind him. More birds. These men are all birds. “You’re late,” he tells Richard. “You’re making all of us late. I have at least three more meetings today I have to sit through, you could at least be on time.”

Richard’s smile is just on the cheeky side of bashful. He knows exactly what he’s doing; Tiger is recording all of this. “Have you met Jasim?”

Drake-Wayne flicks his eyes over to look at Tiger. “No,” he replies, dismissively. “Please?” he asks.

Richard seems absolutely unfazed. “I haven’t finished my beer.”

“Robin, please,” Drake-Wayne tries again. He isn’t plaintive, but he means it. 

Richard hums. “Are you sure you don’t want a drink, Jasim?” he asks, as he comes around the bar.

“I’m Muslim,” Jasim replies. Tiger thinks that Richard is a brat, and if he were in Drake-Wayne’s place, he would have likely shot him by now.

Richard shakes his head. “No, I mean another seltzer? Maybe a soda? I keep telling our supplier that we should just make our own, you know? In those weird flavors. Like bubblegum.”

“That sounds disgusting,” Jasim responds, his nose curling a bit.

“Anyway,” Richard continues, as if nothing happened, “I think it would be kind of a fun draw. Carnival flavors, but really tasty. Besides, there are plenty of people who don’t drink and who still want to have a good night out, right?”

Timothy goes to sit next to his brother at the bar, and drops his head into his forearms. Richard keeps talking to Jasim. “I was thinking of getting a cotton candy machine, too. We could make a drink where you pour the liquor through the cotton candy-”

“I’ll make the call about Allegra,” Timothy finally interrupts. 

Richard looks over at his brother. “Duckling,” he says, seriously, “it’s rude to interrupt.”

There is a very tense, still moment. Timothy Drake-Wayne, feared CEO of Wayne Enterprises, very likely the man responsible for the movement of guns and drugs up and down the entire east coast and most of the west, the man who, some rumors state, arranged the death of his own parents to smooth the way for his adoption into Wayne’s family, goes as silent as the grave.

Jasim waits.

Tiger notes the name. _Allegra_. Allegra Madden? Carmine Falcone’s daughter, maybe?

But the moment passes, and Richard pushes his glass over. It’s still half-full. “I’m sorry, Jasim,” he says, smiling again. This time there is annoyance in his eyes. “We’ll have to finish our conversation another day. Come on, Duckling,” he says, as he gets up, as he leads the way out the door.

The girls at the cash register all sigh as they walk out, and Jasim has to turn to them. “No one said this was a break,” he says, sternly, and they all _giggle_ before they go back to actual tasks.

~~~~

Contact with Helena is a sporadic thing. Sometimes Tiger will get a message, and he’ll have to find a way to get to a safe spot and call her. Other times, he’ll make the call himself. There is no set time; Tiger doesn’t operate that way. They both know that things change too quickly in the spy game.

He can’t call from his flophouse, because he is paranoid about the thickness of the walls and the possibility of his crime lord boss bugging the place _just because_ , so he usually calls during a run. There are parks in Gotham that are safe for runners, so Tiger picks one and goes for a long, easy run. About five miles in he stops in a spot he likes for the clear vista and lack of places for anyone to hide, sits on the side of the road, and calls Helena to report. “It’s a little early for this, isn’t it?” Helena asks when he turns his comm on.

“There is something to be said for responsibility, Matron,” he replies, rubbing his chin. It’s cold, and he can’t sit out here for long without getting irrationally cross. He thinks of summers somewhere balmy. Why can’t he be sent to Egypt or Greece? Gotham in the winter should be an abandoned hellscape. Only insane people live here.

“Well then,” she responds. “Report.”

“I’ve made contact with Grayson-Wayne. He’s an idiot,” Tiger says, seriously, “but he does seem to be in control of his family. He’s very invested in the club I manage, and so I suspect I will be able to involve myself more in his affairs.”

“Drake-Wayne?”

“Only momentary contact. He did not seem to recognize me from our last encounter.”

“The little one?”

Ah. The demon child. “I have not heard of him. I do not know if he’s in Gotham.”

“Keep an eye out. My intel says that Grayson-Wayne is very attached to him, so I can’t imagine that if he’s with his mother, he’ll be there for very long,” she replies. “Anything else?”

“Jason.”

“You saw him?”

“With Grayson-Wayne. He looks very hale and whole, for a dead man,” Tiger says, and he hears some rustling; he knows that Helena is probably pulling that file now. There’s silence on the line. “I only met him a moment.”

“He left the family for a time; he might be a way in, too. Cultivate that,” he’s told, and Tiger looks up, feeling a measure of exhaustion. He’s barely in his thirties, but he feels too old right now. “Agent 1.”

“Matron.”

There is another silence, and more rustling. “Remember we’re tracking family stability. If you can gauge how much this family still has a hold on Gotham, then we can pull you out faster.”

He sighs a little, grumpy, but not unduly. “Send me the specs on Allegra Madden, then.”

“I’ll have it delivered via the standard encryption,” she says, “Is this a lead or an issue?”

“I’m not sure yet,” Tiger admits. “Just a name they let drop in my presence.”

Helena hums. “Don’t get too distracted with petty things,” she finally says.

“I’m not a child.”

“You don’t like the cold,” Matron says, almost cheerfully. “Hopefully we can get you out for a nice, long, south of the equator military destabilization soon.”

He manages not to laugh, but turns the comm off, and finishes his run.

~~~~~

Jason Wayne is a hard man to track down; especially since Grayson-Wayne’s annual midwinter party is apparently going to happen at the Circus. It means that Jasim is on call, and it means that Tiger can’t go out and cultivate a full night’s sleep, let alone a relationship with a notoriously elusive potential criminal.

It doesn’t help - not a single bit - that the entire staff of the Circus seems have lost their grip with their single collective brain cell when they learned about the party. “You all do understand that you will not be _in attendance_ , but _working_ , yes?” Jasim asks at the staff meeting.

Blue-hair bartender doesn’t seem deterred by this fact. “But we’ll get to see it, right? Jase-”

“Jasim.”

“-you have to understand, this is the event of the season. This is bigger than his birthday,” she continues, brightly.

Inappropriate facial piercings agrees. “And plus, he’ll probably stop by and flirt with you again,” she coos, and Jasim doesn’t know where they got the idea they were flirting in the first place.

“You will all be consummate professionals,” Jasim tries, even though he knows that they will all, at some point in the night, drop something or ruin an order or pass along drugs or, heaven forbid, insist that Grayson-Wayne talk to Jasim for more than a passing hello. He may be on a mission but he has priorities.

“Of course they will,” says Jason, who shows up at the door. He’s wearing a red hoodie and looks generally disgruntled to be there. “They always are.”

The stupidest bartender of them all, a boy who Tiger thinks of personally as Tight Pants for his inability to wear any clothing that fits him, or that would fit a toddler, gets up. “Mr. Wayne!” he says, and immediately puts his arms around Jason Wayne.

Jason Wayne does not return the hug. He stands there looking like a plank of wood. “I swear, I don’t know where Dick finds you,” he says, rolling his eyes, but then Tight Pants goes to inspect the box that Jason drops on the table. “All five of you, start unloading,” he starts, and when Jasim goes to follow, Jason shakes his head. “Not you,” he says. “Go over the budget lines for me.”

The bartenders are taking the box and are out the door as Jasim goes to get the books, even though a part of him is curious. Jason looks almost lethally bored; they’re only about a third done before Tiger has had enough. “Would it be easier to email this to you?” he asks.

“Yes,” Jason admits, his lips pressed together, “But I don’t give staff my email. I barely give my brothers my email.”

“Would it insult you to suggest that this is well within budget?” Jasim offers, because Jason looks like he would rather be skinny-dipping in acid than listening to another moment of this. Tiger can relate, really, he absolutely can. He, too, would rather be jumping out of a plane and into toxic waste then spend another day here, but they’re both suffering. So Jasim, kind soul that he is, is willing to allow himself the offer.

Besides, Tiger was told to cultivate Jason Wayne. What better way to start?

Jason shrugs. “No,” he says, “From what I’ve heard, you’re good about budgets, at least.” He purses his lips together. “Just show me the last line item, and then I’ll be out of your hair.”

“You must care very deeply about this event,” Jasim tries, as he shows the last line item, and the totals.

“I care that Dick doesn’t throw a tantrum,” is the reply he gets. “You probably didn’t notice how much of a brat he can be.”

Tiger can’t help it. He can’t. There’s good spywork and then there’s just truths too powerful to deny. He laughs, a deep belly laugh, for just a moment. Jason smiles. “My apologies,” Jasim tries, and he spreads out in the chair he’s in, relaxing. “I did not expect anything so pointed.” He snorts. “Or so true.”

“Well, if you can’t say that kind of thing about your family, who can you say it about? Do you have brothers?” Jason asks, looking far less bored now.

“A sister,” Tiger lies, easily, like breathing. “In Islamabad.”

“Is she impossible?”

Jasim’s sister is pure fiction. Tiger had cousins - armies of cousins - but his mother only had one child. “She is a tolerant girl, who is doing me a great number of favors by taking care of our mother.”

Jason presses a thumb to his mouth. “Dick said something like that. Said you send them all your money.”

Jasim goes quiet, a man who thinks too much. “Yes,” he finally says. “My family is very important to me.”

Jason seems to consider that. “You’ve been in Gotham what - a month? Two?”

“About that,” Jasim says, tilting his head a bit, curious now. Jason is rubbing his mouth a bit. 

Jason nods. “If you need to make some extra money, let me know,” he finally says. He does not elaborate on how, which only makes the hair on the back of Tiger’s neck prickle with _curiosity_. 

“I would not say no,” he finally says, looking at Jason in a way he hopes is both curious and careful.

Jason hums. “Help me with this party, and we’ll see how it goes.”

~~~~

“Helping” with this party is not what Tiger had hoped for, not in the least, because it turns out that this party involves not only managing the staff (his job) but now a series of errands that seem both endless and incredibly stupid. Grayson-Wayne gets his cotton candy machine, which Tight Pants immediately breaks, requiring Jasim to drive to Atlantic City to acquire a new one. Animal licenses are suddenly a thing that it is Jasim’s responsibility to acquire. A performer falls from the high wire and accidentally snaps it, somehow, in a feat that none of the performers or Grayson-Wayne himself can truly puzzle out. She was working with a net, so no one was hurt, but it left Grayson-Wayne in the kind of mood that left almost everyone except the bar staff fleeing in his wake.

So Jasim replaced it. Jasim also: found a lion, a lion-tamer, a lawyer to write up the lion-tamers contract, called the publicity managers of at least ten celebrities, turned down several attempts at a camera crew to be present, hired four new bouncers based not on their ability to drag a person out of a room but rather on their _hip to shoulder ratio_ (what was Grayson-Wayne’s obsession with that twinkish waist?), and specifically locked several skylights that had been “left for scenic purposes, but were now a hazard, if Oswald Cobblepot decided to ruin the evening.”

This last one seems absurd. But Jasim does it, which means by the night of the party itself, he is exhausted, and he has spent literally an hour with Jason Wayne, every second of which was spent cursing Richard Grayson-Wayne’s desire to have a pitch perfect strong man, a _Narrows thug with big muscles_ not good enough.

Jason had been in a similar bad mood, which made Jasim think that maybe it was more than just the strong man. 

The night of the party Jasim puts on a different shemagh, a suit that is not tailored but fits sufficiently well, and Tiger goes as if he’s marching to hell.

And the truth of it is that the majority of the party is-

-well, it’s fine. Jasim can sit in the offices that overlook the dance floor, with a pair of earplugs that block out 80% of the infernal noise coming from downstairs. There’s a platform with the lion tamer, a platform with a strong man, and the performers on the lyras and the high-wire are putting on the kind of show that is normally reserved for high-end Russian circuses. Actually, from the view from the office, it’s not so bad; he can almost block out the sea of writhing bodies, right up until he spots-

-there is no God, he thinks blasphemously as he watches Grayson-Wayne, in his tailored suit, looking beautiful and utterly rumpled at the same time, climb the tall scaffold to the trapeze that hangs at the very top of the building.

He knows all about this man’s childhood, he does. Frankly, he knows more about this man than almost anyone else, than probably his own brothers at this point, but it’s all things you learn in a textbook. There is something very different about seeing a grief-stricken young crimelord whose city may or may not be unraveling at the seams, who is the target for more than one assassin, who is utterly and completely brainless beyond reason, take the trapeze in hand.

Tiger doesn’t know why he suddenly is leaving the office and making his way through the press of bodies. He remembers the snapped high wire and his heart begins to rise up like gorge, into his throat. 

Everyone is looking up.

Everyone is looking up, and suddenly-

-Grayson-Wayne starts.

Tiger did not have a childhood that allowed for flights of fancy. He did not have a childhood where he was taken to the circus, where he got to watch television. He has had an adulthood where he has seen people fly, but that always looked so _unreal_. It was like the human mind could not fully process the wonders of Superman in the air, so it immediately announced it was a very fake trick, even though it most certainly wasn’t.

As it stands, Tiger has never seen Superman in person, so it hardly matters. But he is watching Richard Grayson-Wayne now, the last of the flying Graysons, and he suddenly realizes that he did not know anything before. He flies in his suit, he flies like he was born for the sky and not the ground, he flies and he flips and he’s laughing as one of the other artists is giving him support.

But he is the star of the show.

He does this move - he falls, and everyone gasps, but it is intentional, and the net catches him and he uses that to bounce back up and catch the trapeze again, and everyone is applauding. _Tiger_ is applauding. 

And then it’s over, and he’s back in the net, and he spots Tiger just under it. “Jasim!” he exclaims, bright as sunshine, and he flips right into Tiger’s arms. Into Jasim’s arms. “God, you’re so _thick_ ,” he purrs.

The spell breaks.

Jasim sets him down gently. “I didn’t know you were going to do that,” he mutters, gruffly, going over the many, many ways he can kill this stupid, beautiful, infuriating human with just what’s on his person. 

Richard smiles, and it’s one of those _trap_ smiles he excels at. “Neither did I,” he admits, proudly, stupidly, this terrible, awful man.

Tiger wants to growl at him to not do it again, but it’s clear he knows what he’s doing, and someone else - some redhead with snapping green eyes - catches Richard by the arm, and suddenly Tiger is alone. He is about to go back to the office-

-but he needs air. It’s too hot. He can’t breathe. 

The alley just behind the club is small and narrow and there is already someone in it. Jason is smoking a cigarette and has his head against the wall; he looks like he’s had enough of this. He looks up when Tiger steps out, and makes a noise. “Every single time,” Jason says. “He flies, and I feel like the whole fucking world falls away. It’s a trip to come back to it,” he adds.

“He does this often, then?” Jasim asks, waving a hand at the offer of a cigarette.

Jason shrugs. “He didn’t used to. When our-” he stops, starts, “-when Bruce was alive, he almost never went up.”

Ah. “Grief is a funny thing,” Jasim says, careful.

“Maybe,” Jason admits, as Jasim comes in closer, so finally they’re standing next to each other. “When I...I mean, it’s not a secret,” he mutters, finally, “I had an accident, and I spent some time away. When that happened, he lost something. Bought this stupid club. Sorry,” he mutters. 

It’s an emotional high, followed by a fast dip. That’s why Jason is talking, and Tiger knows it. Tiger didn’t mean to catch this, but it’s pure luck he did. “He bought it to fly, you mean? Couldn’t he go to a gym for that?”

“We don’t do drugs,” Jason says sternly. “I smoke, and that’s as close as it gets. So he performs. It’s the only high he can really chase.”

“And you?” Jasim asks, careful.

“We all have our shit.” Jason takes another long drag of his cigarette. “Come on. The bartenders will lose their minds if they miss you for another minute.”

Jason is not wrong; he comes back to all of the bartenders juggling their collective braincell over one of their phones, so Jasim has to snarl at them so that they go back to work. 

The night ends at dawn both literally, and figuratively. The people really start to leave around then, and Jasim spots Drake-Wayne passed out in a back room with an enormous man with a haircut so ugly it must be extremely trendy on one side of him, his suit coat draped over his head as he drools on the dubious sofa. The bartenders, stupid as a unit, are at least savvy enough to leave him alone. 

Grayson-Wayne is still up, still bouncing, waving off the stragglers with boundless energy that must be chemical. Only the words that Jason said still linger: they don’t do drugs. Jason is crabbily hunched over in one of the booths, and Tiger feels a true kinship with this man. 

Grayson-Wayne sits next to his brother, and Jasim is finishing the last of the night’s inventory, getting ready to hand it to the day manager when he hears the crash. The entire bartending staff is suddenly nowhere to be found.

The crash was glassware from the table that the Wayne boys are sitting in. Richard looks angry, and Jason looks like he’s rousing from sleep to a true fury. They are arguing - loudly - in a language that Tiger does not understand. Jason is looking at Jasim, then, and then back at Richard, and then he’s pushing Richard out of the way, to stalk out of the club.

Richard looks lost, and tired, as if ever bit of the energy that sustained him through the night is gone. The bartenders are nowhere to be found.

Jasim moves across the room to pick up the broken glass. “I’m sorry,” Richard manages, and then he’s on the ground, too. “I swear we’re not savages.”

Tiger really wants to point out that in fact, they are both savages, thanks, and he’s the idiot who has to deal with them, but Jasim would never. “It was a very long night,” he concedes. He fills his bucket with broken glass. “One of the custodial staff will handle the rest.”

“I hope we pay them enough,” Richard jokes. His smile is soft now, tired, his eyelashes drooping a little.

Jasim stands up. “Is your driver coming?”

“Hmm? Oh,” Richard says, and nods. “Alfred is likely outside.”

Drake-Wayne staggers out of the back room a moment later. “Robin?” he says, and Richard smiles and opens one arm. Drake-Wayne stumbles underneath it. “Where’d Bluejay go?”

“Talk to the boys,” he replies.

“Shit,” Drake-Wayne mutters. He’s silent as they start to stagger out, but Tiger manages to catch him say something. “I have a shareholder’s meeting.”

“Sounds thrilling,” Richard says as they both make their way out the door.

Tiger follows just in time to catch them both getting into the back of a town car, and his mouth flattens into a line as he turns to see the entirety of the bartending staff staring at him. “You do know you are not getting paid to gawk.”

Every single one of the little terrors beams, and then they scatter again to finish their tasks. Once everyone is done, it’s daylight, and Tiger would very much like to get some sleep, which is why when he’s halfway to the flophouse his earpiece goes off. “Matron,” he grumbles as he turns a corner. The streets are empty, still; it is early on Sunday morning, and not even the most religious of churchgoers or the most brutally aggressive bruncher is out yet. 

“Your ass is trending on twitter.” Helena says.

Tiger honestly thinks, for a moment, he’s having a stroke. He tries to go over those words again - he knows what twitter is, he’s not a complete idiot, and he’s barely thirty-four - but none of those words put together make sense. “What are you talking about?” 

“Well, to be fair, it’s your entire back, your shemagh, and your “thick biceps” as you princess carry BB.” Helena elaborates. BB is code for Richard - for Biggest Brother - and it takes Tiger a moment to remember that.

Tiger fishes his phone out of his pocket and turns it on. Helena is patient as he scrolls through twitter on the web browser, and there it is, an image of his back from earlier in the night. The caption reads _I [heart icon] those thicc biceps and so does Richie Wayne_. The account belongs to Tight Pants. It has an obscene amount of retweets. 

Because it is roughly seven in the morning, and because it is freezing, and because Tiger is _tired_ , his mouth opens. “Those idiots misspelled thick. English isn’t even my first language and I know that.”

“You are not that old, Agent,” Helena replies. 

“Requesting permission to murder five stupid children. No one will miss them,” Tiger snarls.

“Denied. I didn’t know this was a honeypot mission, but whatever you need to do to get it done,” Helena says, and she’s not teasing. “How did the party go?”

Tiger is quiet for a moment, but only a moment, as he tries to figure out how to analyze what he saw. He is not an analyst by training, but he can do field analysis extremely well. He has to. “BB is not stable. His grief is making him reckless, and seeking highs. 2B confessed as much. They had a fight.” 

“About?”

“It was not in a language I understood. 2B headed out somewhere to talk to _the boys_. DB had a shareholder meeting.”

Helena hums. “Romani, probably,” she says. “Richard speaks it, it wouldn’t surprise me if they all do, at this point.” She goes quiet for long enough that Tiger thinks maybe he can start moving again, but then she speaks. “Continue to cultivate. 2B is probably your in. I think he’s the most likely to open up.”

“Based on?” Tiger asks.

“He’s speaking to you, isn’t he? Previous intel stated he doesn’t speak to anyone.”

Tiger is silent a moment. “What is the aim?” he finally asks.

“I’m still not sure about the stability of Gotham. Word is the Red Hoods are trying a power grab from the False Facers. They’ve never done that before. Without B to hold power, the smaller gangs seem to be rebelling against the entire family.” Helena hums again.

Tiger knows that Helena sees the bigger picture. That there _is_ a bigger picture, and he knows that really, it’s not his job to understand that. How one gang moving against a bigger one fits into the scheme of global politics is not his business. But here he is. The Red Hoods were a small time gang, run by some small-time crook who wore a red bucket over his head. They weren’t a part of the Wayne Syndicate. But they never moved much outside of their spot in the Narrows, keeping small. Drugs. Local protection rackets. Moving against Sionis, one of the big names in Gotham crime?

His line of thought is interrupted. “Agent, one last thing,” Helena says, and when Tiger grunts a response that he’s listening, she continues. “Madden?”

“What about her?”

“She’s gone,” Helena replies. 

Tiger goes quiet. “Gone how?” he asks, careful.

“Gone gone. Vanished. Family won’t confirm if she died or not, and the Gazette hasn’t picked up, but she’s been off the grid for at least a few days.”

Tiger crosses his arms over his chest, but then he makes a noise again. “Affirmative. I’ll follow up,” he confirms, before Helena breaks the connection.

He stays still for a moment, but decides. No. Sleep, first, solution after.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Probably 4 chapters? Probably, I say. Please note some updated tags have been added, because I'm nothing if not distressingly predictable.

Tiger has the two days following the party off, as a small miracle from God. He spends the first day sleeping off the stress, buying food, and monitoring the bugs he placed inside of both Wayne Manor and the club. The bugs inside of Wayne Manor are relatively useless - they’re not on the right side of the enormous house, so mostly they catch the staff cleaning and occasionally one of the staff watching a soap opera at eleven in the morning as they clean one of the sitting rooms. Very occasionally, one of Damian Wayne’s dogs will show up, prompting a lot of _you’re not supposed to be in here_ and cooing of _who’s a good dog?_ which in Tiger’s opinion, sends mixed messages.

It’s the second day where he gets up, gets dressed, and drives up to the Falcone mansion. It’s on the other side of Gotham, where it can look over the city, and it’s more a compound than a mansion. He has in the car a box of fresh produce that he picked up from the delivery company that usually handles the Falcone’s deliveries, stating that he was one of the Falcone’s new drivers.

They didn’t ask any questions as they handed him boxes of food. He gets up to the Falcone compound and drives in through the back entrance - map courtesy of the analysts at Spyral - and gets to the gate. The guard inside the gatehouse asks what happened to the truck, and Tiger slips into his thickest accent to tell him _truck broke down_ , showing him the boxes. The guard looks slightly surprised, but takes Tiger’s fake ID and makes Tiger wait.

Helena handled the next part. She had one of the techs hijack the phone number for the food distributor, so when the guard calls, he gets a Spyral agent. Tiger imagines it’s going something along the lines of _yes, we apologize for the inconvenience, that is our employee Bashir Gaji. Our truck broke down and he offered to make the delivery in his car, because we know what an important client the Falcone family is_.

A minute later the guard is coming out of the guardhouse. “Have you been here before? Pull up to the kitchen. The cook may need help unloading.”

Tiger nods, and pulls up. He planned the timing on this from previous intel on the Falcone house - usually there’s a full staff, except around eleven in the morning, when the family is generally out before lunch and most of the staff takes a break, except for the cook.

The cook, Norma Nardini, was perhaps the most famous mob cook in the world, and she comes out of the kitchen as Tiger picks up one of the two enormous boxes. “You’re new,” she says, as she takes the second box.

“Yes,” Tiger says, about to fall into his second identity when he steps into the light, warm kitchen and sees an older man sitting at the kitchen table with a cup of tea. He recognizes-

-it’s Alfred Pennyworth.

Alfred Pennyworth doesn’t know what Tiger looks like, so he can likely salvage this. He sets the box down, and Pennyworth smiles gently. “Are you quite certain you don’t want any help, Norma?”

“You’re a guest,” she says, and she looks at Tiger.

Tiger rolls his shoulders in, looks embarrassed. “Is there a restroom I may use, please?” he asks. 

“Servant’s bathroom is around the corner,” she says, pointing a finger around the corner. 

Once out of sight, Tiger sets a mental timer for ten minutes - he can reasonably and embarrassingly concoct that he had gastric distress for a little bit more than that, but after ten minutes, he thinks they will get suspicious. 

Previous intel also gave him a layout of the building, which he memorized before he left his apartment earlier. He starts up the back stairs, silent, moving fast. The house is empty, and in a minute and a half Tiger finds his way to the office.

He doesn’t have time. He knows there is security, so he slips gloves on and sets a localized EMP off to make the lights blink. It’ll restart any cameras, giving him roughly two minutes to case the room.

He’s not worried about the valuable things, so that helps. Instead he’s looking for anything that might tell him what happened to Allegra Madden. He sorts through papers, and finds a thick, embossed envelope. Tiger opens it and scans it, and internally he swears, sets it down, and is back down the stairs, his gloves back in his pocket. Eight minutes.

Tiger goes around the corner, and he’s almost at the bathroom, when he is practically clotheslined by a small, angry child. 

The last time that Tiger saw Damian Wayne, Tiger was covered from head to toe, his face covered, a pair of thick goggles over his eyes. He is not worried that Damian Wayne recognizes him. There are other things that worry him. Perhaps that Damian Wayne will forget himself and launch at a complete stranger’s head is not _chief_ among them, but it is up there. That concussion took quite some time to heal from.

Damian makes this dismissive noise, a click of his tongue, and turns into the kitchen. Tiger feels this sweat start to bead against his neck, and he feels that he’s on the run. He is almost at the bathroom when he hears someone speak. “Chickadee-” he hears, and he turns.

It’s Jason.

Jason stares at him.

Tiger stares back. Jason looks around, and Damian comes back around the corner. “What?” he asks. Of course, Tiger thinks. Another bird. 

“Jasim, what are you doing here?” Jason asks, all kindness in his voice a distant memory. Norma comes around the corner, and any hope that Tiger had of leaving without a scene is evaporating. 

Tiger dips his chin. “My second job,” he mutters into his chest, hoping he sounds properly embarrassed.

“You work here?” Jason asks, and looks over at Norma. 

Damian’s eyes are starting to narrow. Norma, thankfully, rescues him. “No,” she yelps, and looks Jasim over. “He delivered my groceries from Luigi’s!”

Damian rolls his eyes. “This is the manager for Robin’s club? Is he not paying him enough?”

There is a long, pregnant, uncomfortable pause. “I told you I send all my money to my mother.” Tiger finally manages, into the fabric of his shemagh.

“And I told you to tell me if you needed-” Jason starts, and shakes his head. “We’ll discuss this at the club.”

“I should be going,” Tiger offers, and he starts towards the door. 

Damian mutters, “Can we go as well?” he asks his brother. 

“I can wrap up,” Pennyworth offers, coming around the corner now, too, a new witness to this humiliating exercise in getting caught. 

Jason shakes his head. “You know what? We’ll catch a ride with Jasim back into the city. If he’s heading for Luigi’s, WE is on the way. You shouldn’t have to rush, I know you were catching up.”

Pennyworth looks mildly pleased by this. “That is very kind of you, Master Jason. I should hate to put Mr. Khan out, however.”

“It is not a problem,” Tiger says, and it’s true, it’s not, even though he suspects that whatever conversation they’re going to have is going to be deeply unpleasant.

Norma takes Jason by the head and kisses him on both cheeks, like she’s a doting grandmother. “You’re a good boy, Jay,” she tells him, and pats Damian on the head like he isn’t potentially a rabid beast. “I’ll pack up some cookies and you can be on your way.”

She goes into the kitchen and makes a care package that she deposits into Damian’s hands, while Jason goes back to wherever he came from to say goodbye to whoever it was he was seeing, and then Tiger is leading them to his car. 

He opens the door for Damian, who does _not_ thank him when he goes into the back. Jason takes the passenger side seat, and turns as Damian sits there. “Buckle up.”

Jasim waits. Tiger would likely turn and and snarl for him to put on his damned seat belt, but Jason seems to have the glaring his little brother habit down to an art form. And his big brother, for that matter.

Damian’s jaw locks, and Tiger can see the reflection of Bruce Wayne there. Of all of his sons, this is the blood son, the one who was born with his impressive scowl. There are cave paintings of the earliest Waynes, Tiger thinks, with that scowl. 

Jason’s own scowl gives him a run for his money. They stare at each other menacingly, until Jasim sighs. “You’re going to Wayne Enterprises, then?”

“Shut up,” Jason snaps, and Tiger lifts his head. He tips his head just a little, turns it just a little. “I’ll tell you when you can drive.”

“I am not your _boy_ ,” Tiger says, and he knows that this is one of those rare places where he cannot be Jasim. “Do not think to speak to me that way.”

Damian peers at Tiger - he can see his curious green eyes in the mirror. His mother has those eyes. He has his mother’s attitude; he is born of empires. A prince among princes. Tiger can see that, but he sees the boy, too, small and pampered and cherished. 

Jason reels back as if he’s been slapped, and Damian, in a show of absolute defiance, fastens his seatbelt.

They ride in silence for at least twenty minutes. 

Finally, Jason breaks the silence. “I don’t want you working anywhere near the Falcones,” he says, staring out the window. 

“It was not intentional,” Jasim replies. “An accident, I assure you.”

“You know we kill men for doing that, right?” Jason asks, and there is a small noise of assent from the backseat. “I’m giving you a pass because you don’t know Gotham.”

Tiger imagines that Jasim, a man who works a tax paying job at a tax paying business, a man who is in this country on a visa that could easily fall apart, would be unaware of how to handle such a threat. Jason is the family enforcer; Tiger knows that. A threat like that is, in fact, a threat.

But Tiger is just not afraid of this man. He knows he is dangerous, but a part of him still sees a boy who does not know how to handle that his father is dead.

But Jasim would be afraid. He goes silent, and lets that silent sit between them. He lets Jason decide what that silence means. “You do not have to threaten me,” Jasim finally says, so quiet and so timid that it might be read as fear, instead of the dull fury that Tiger really feels, mixed with the cautious curiosity of what Jason is doing. “I can quit.”

“Robin will not like you bullying him,” Damian drawls from the back seat.

“Shut up,” Jason snaps. “Robin isn’t actually my boss.”

That’s curious, but Jasim stays silent and Tiger turns the car easily onto one of the many bridges to downtown. Damian is sniggering, now. “Should I let him know you said that?”

“Should I let him know what you did to Luca Falcone?” Jason replies, and turns, and flicks the boy between the eyes. 

Damian reels back, but pouts. Jason nods up. “Here,” he says. “We’ll drop him off, then you and I are going for a drive.”

If Jasim were smart, he’d wet himself right about now. Damian gets out of the car in front of Wayne Enterprises. “Robin is waiting for you,” Jason tells him, hanging halfway out of the car.

Tiger makes a survey of how many guns he has in the car. Two, at hand, where he can reach them. Jason nods for him to drive. “Down the bridge,” he directs him. Close to the Narrows, then, maybe that’ll be the place.

He drives. “You’re awfully calm,” Jason says, and he almost sounds amused by this.

“Would you prefer I panic while I drive?”

Jason hums gently, as if he’s considering the answer to that. Tiger drives, and wonders if he’ll have to burn this identity and call Helena and just tell her it was fucked from the start. Jason directs him, and Tiger feels the sweater under his shemagh drip down the back of his spine.

The adrenaline feels like a coil of energy, and he thinks that if it doesn’t release, something terrible will happen. Or, certainly, at the last, he may do something that he will regret.

Finally they’re out by the water, and Jason tells him to turn the car off. Jasim does as he’s told and looks Jason in the eye. “You said,” Jason tells him, looking back. So close to water his eyes do not look so blue. They look almost green. “That you are not my _boy_.”

Jasim breathes in. Tiger thinks about the speed it would take him to reach for a gun. “That’s right.”

“Does that make you my _man_?” Jason asks. “Is that how you would prefer I treat you?”

Tiger is actually stunned by those words, and it must show, because Jason looks positively smug about it. Every single one of Bruce Wayne’s sons came from Hell, he decides. “Are you offering me an apology?” he asks, because there is no normal implication to those words.

Jason checks his fingernails. “I want to know if you speak to every one of your bosses that way, or if it’s just me.”

“You’ll notice my staff seems to be under the impression I hate them generally,” he replies. It’s not entirely a lie, though. “But no.”

Jason goes quiet, tips his head up. “What if I were to ask you to?”

Once, in Algeria, Tiger was thrown twenty feet into a wall by a man who had been given an experimental drug to enhance strength and induce rage. He had hit every part of his body, including his head, against that wall. The disorientation he experienced that day was nothing compared to the disorientation that he is experiencing now. “You want to pay me to be severe with you?” Jasim asks, because he wants to be perfectly clear at what exactly is being asked of him.

Jason tips his head a little. “My brothers don’t particularly help me with my rage issues,” he says, passively. “They’re perfectly willing to let me go overboard.”

“You want me to yell at you when you go too far.” Jasim says. This is actually something Tiger would be good at - if yelling at idiots were an Olympic sport, Tiger would be a gold medalist - but this seems-

“Not in public,” Jason clarifies. “Not in front of my brothers. In private.”

The words _are you asking me to play a dominant with you?_ are practically begging to exit his lips. “What parameters would you want beyond that?”

“You can tell me what to do, although I might not do it. I’ll bounce ideas off you. I won’t call you boy again. And I might ask you about some of the...other things I do for this family. You do know about that, right? About who you’re working for?” Jason says.

Jasim stares. This is.

Actually, this is ideal. This is precisely what Helena wanted. Richard sees Jasim as some kind of bartending confidant, comfortable enough to jump in his arms. And Jason wants-

“I’ll call you _daddy_ , if it makes you feel better about it,” Jason offers. “Or is it _baba_?”

Tiger practically whites out. Hell. This man came from _Hell_. There are demons that strike less fear in Tiger. “Not necessary,” he mutters in reply. “Jasim will do,” he adds. “But all right. Yes. I will yell at you for money.”

“And you’ll stop delivering for Luigis? I really can’t have you up at the Falcones again,” Jason says. “We don’t like to mix things like that.”

“Pay me the difference,” Jasim says, and Tiger will make up the pittance of whatever he imagines a delivery driver to make.

“Deal,” Jason says. “Drive.”

“Manners,” Jasim growls.

Jason smiles, like this is going to work out perfectly.

Jasim drops Jason off at some bar in the Narrows and then he drives to his flophouse. It is a dilapidated old apartment building, where the residents seem to be either extremely down on their luck or have solidly given up on the city where they live. No one speaks to each other, which is good, because in turn, no one speaks to him, except for a little girl whose mother is one of the more _down on their luck_ sorts. Her hair is always in precise braids, and she is obviously either Muslim or knows someone who is, because she meticulously greets Tiger with a _as-salaamu alaikum_ whenever she sees him. It has worked for everyone - primarily Tiger - so far.

He gets up to his room, entering and removing his shoes at the door. 

It is barely anything more than a bare mattress on the floor and a tiny, workable kitchen. There is a small space for his prayer mat, and Tiger keeps the place scrupulously clean. The only thing he purchased for this nightmare establishment were cleaning supplies.

He takes his shemagh off first, setting it down carefully on the bed, and then his jacket. The apartment is never warm - the walls are thin like paper and the heating is intermittent - but Tiger is hot, despite the damp sweat from fear that congealed in his shirt. He takes his shirt off too, but he feels stricken with fever.

The words _or is it baba_ stick in the inside of Tiger’s mind, burrowing an insidious path from his memory to the pleasure center of his brain. He growls as he palms himself, his erection growing quickly under his hand. The idea of Jason Wayne, the family enforcer, asking to be put in his place by Tiger is possibly too much. It makes the heat worse, and so Tiger maneuvers himself onto the bed, opens his trousers and tugs them down over his hips.

Jason had that look on his face like he was so much better than this request, no matter how desperate or filthy, so Tiger has to imagine, instead, what Jason might look like desperate to be taken apart. He has to admit, the challenge it might pose is part of the appeal, that lazy look that Jason has turning to real surprise when he’s told no - like earlier, in the car - it only goes to his head all the more. 

At some point he realizes he’s jacking off, stroking himself as he arches back in his bed, his hips bucking slightly up in time with his hand. The words _or is it baba_ play on loop, along with the way Jason looked at him, the wide sweep of his eyelashes against his cheeks. Tiger strokes faster as he thinks of it - that boy on his knees, his face against Tiger’s thigh, the way he could look, every inch of muscle on display. Tiger - a sucker for scars - is willing to bet there is more than one he could run his tongue over.

The pleasure mounts, his hips stuttering, and he realizes he’s about to come just as his comm - still in his ear - goes off. Tiger falls off the bed.

“Agent 1?”

“Yes,” he says, pathetically, onto his floor. 

Helena’s voice is a touch concerned. “Are you all right?”

“Fine. Apartment. Give me twenty minutes,” Tiger replies, because he won’t have a conversation with Matron in his apartment. 

He looks down at his cock with a measure of disgust with himself and slight regret, resigns himself to blue balls, and puts his clothes back on. Precisely twenty minutes later he’s in the middle of the park again. “Matron,” he says, gruffly.

“I hope I didn’t interrupt anything important,” Helena says, with her voice just slightly letting on that she might know that in fact, yes, she did interrupt something.

Tiger grunts in reply, and she just asks him to report. The most important thing first. “Allegra Madden is dead,” Tiger says into his scarf.

“Any word on how?”

“No. I found the invitation to her funeral in the Falcone residence. I made contact with Damian there, and Jason, on accident. Whenever she died, it was recent. The funeral is tomorrow,” Tiger says watching the running trail that’s just below him. No one is approaching. “I’m surprised this has not emerged.”

“Gotham crime families only keep things like this secret for one reason: if it’s a family matter,” Helena replies. 

Tiger considers that. It sounded like Richard and Timothy were dealing with Allegra Madden, but neither of them was particularly known for direct violence. Someone would have had to act on their behalf. Of course, all of them had generals; the chief purveyor of Gotham-level violence was Jason. But that still didn’t make much sense - he could not imagine the Falcones would allow any Wayne after killing one of their family. Still. “So Richard potentially had Allegra Madden killed, although why is still in question. And the Wayne boys are powerful enough that despite that, their enforcer, their precious youngest, and their butler were all at the Falcone residence.”

“They always have had a pretty solid grasp on the older families,” Helena accedes. “Why would they kill Allegra Madden? She wasn’t involved in anything. She married some nobody, had a kid.”

Tiger rubs his mouth. “I am not a detective,” he points out, “and I think this is beyond the scope of my mission.”

Helena pauses, in a way that signals she’s thinking about what he’s saying. He is not a detective, and they both know that’s true. This is, actually, beyond the scope of what he’s really meant to do. He was supposed to come and figure out the stability of Gotham, not investigate the crimes perpetrated by its top families. “You’re right,” she says, “but I think it’s relevant. Keep your ears open.”

“Jason asked me to, well.” Tiger pauses. 

“Out with it.”

“Scold him,” Tiger finally settles on, because it’s so much better than any other way to put it. “It seems he wishes for someone to growl at him whenever he goes too far.”

There is a crackle of silence so long that Tiger hopes it’s because Helena accidentally dropped the line, because he wants to sink into the rock he’s sitting on in embarrassment. “I don’t know what I expected you to say, but I don’t think this was even on the list of options,” Helena finally admits.

“I was also surprised,” Tiger mutters. “I do not know why.”

“Really?” Helena says, with a quiet pause. “Because I do,” she adds. Tiger makes an inquisitive noise, and she sighs. “His father just died. His father was probably the only person on this planet who did keep him in line. Bruce Wayne wasn’t exactly known for his sunny disposition. And then you show up, all-”

“If you say old-”

“ _-hirsute_ , and growling, and masculine. He probably just wants something to help him grieve.” Helena finishes. “Besides, you do make it appealing.”

Tiger is half-flattered and half-flummoxed. “Are you flirting with me?”

“Wouldn’t dream of it,” Helena responds. “So growl at the boy. It’s a good sign.”

Tiger harrumphs in response, because he had already agreed. He decides he won’t tell Matron that Jason offered to call him daddy, because he doesn’t relish the idea of hearing her laugh until she cries.

~~~~

The days pass; he sees more of his staff and less of Richard, and nothing at all of Timothy or Damian. He does, however, begin to see much more of Jason, who comes by at least once a day to speak to Jasim. He disguises it as _coming by to check on the Circus_ , but even Blue Hair, who Tiger once watched take ten minute to count 100 glasses, knows that it can’t just be for that.

“If you keep smoking like that, you’re going to kill yourself,” Jasim tells Jason as he lights up at the bar, “and you will not smoke in my club.”

Jason doesn’t point out that of the two of them, Jason is the one with the likelier claim to the bar; he just stares balefully at Tiger, batting his eyes, and then puts his cigarette away. Jasim goes to continue the prep and Blue Hair frowns a little as she sidles up to Jasim. “Hey, boss,” she says, sweetly, as if she doesn’t cost them in both time and space, “I didn’t know you were close to Mr. Wayne.”

“I am not,” Jasim says, pinning the schedule up to the board.

“Okay, but, like,” she begins, stammering, “if you had to choose one, would you choose Mr. Wayne, or Dickie?”

“Mr. Grayson-Wayne,” Jasim corrects, because _manners_.

Before he can finish Blue Hair brightens. “Really?” she squeals, “because, like, oh my god, we were so worried. Well, Becca and I were worried, Paulie and Steph-”

“No,” Jasim says, both confused and exhausted at once. “You should refer to him as Mr. Grayson-Wayne,” he clarifies. “And I do not have to choose either of them.”

Blue Hair tilts her head like a particularly dumb bird. “Because…they’re…going to share you?”

“Do you have a single coherent thought that runs through your head, girl?” Tiger snaps, “I am not for _sharing_! Do you not have prep to run through?” he asks, and it almost gets to yelling. Almost. She squeaks, but unlike last time, when she burst into tears, she doesn’t cry this time.

Jason peers in the office as she scurries out. “You know if they quit, you just have to hire new ones.”

“This city breeds idiots. I am sure finding replacements would be no trouble,” Jasim replies, and leans back against the desk. Jason sits on the couch across from him. “Can I do something for you?” Jasim asks, careful.

That stupid series of words - _or is it baba_ \- flash through Tiger’s brain like they’re imprinted there in neon. This is the first time they’ve been alone since that conversation. 

“You’re not wrong about the idiots,” Jason agrees. His knees open a bit. Tiger does not look. “What if I just wanted to spend some time with you?”

“You do know I work for a living?” Jasim says, and Tiger supposes it’s only a partial lie.

Jason considers that. “What if I say I’m feeling a little jumpy? Like I might go out and beat a man senseless?”

Tiger thinks: pick the right target. Jasim is not quite so forgiving of rampant displays of violence. “I would tell you to get a hold of yourself. Is that how you intend on using your strength? With brutally stupid displays of violence?”

“Do you fight?” Jason asks.

“No,” Jasim replies.

“Do you want to learn?” Jason presses.

Jasim looks Jason in the eye. “Do you need me to tell you to go and run ten miles and then come back when you have it out of your system?”

Jason’s eyes are that pretty, almost green shade of blue. “What makes you think I would do it?” he asks, his voice pitched low. He’s not smiling. He looks almost sullen, like he doesn’t know if he wants to obey or not.

It makes Tiger want to smack him. “Go run ten miles, and when you get back, your knuckles had better not have a single scratch on them, little bird.”

They look at each other, and Tiger isn’t sure where the _little bird_ came from, except they’re all little birds, all of Wayne’s boys. Jason snarls, and then dips his head, runs a hand through his curls, and stomps out of the office.

He comes back an hour and a half later, sweaty and looking serene, almost calm, and Tiger knows he’s well and truly fucked. Jason looks like he’s just had extremely good sex, his curls damp and his shirt sticking to his skin. He’s followed by Grayson-Wayne, who looks absolutely perplexed.

“Why do you look so gross?” Richard asks.

“Maybe I just got what I wanted,” Jason replies, and looks over at Jasim.

Richard looks, too, his brow furrowing a bit. He looks like he’s trying to solve a particularly taxing crossword, and then he looks back at Jason. “Did you send the flowers?”

“Mm. Chickadee did it,” Jason replies. “We have to trust him to do what he’s told eventually.”

There’s a pause. “Are you seeing Roy tonight?” 

Jason looks slightly annoyed now. “You’re ruining my high, Robin.”

Jasim is studiously pretending to not be listening to this, finishing his tasks. “Mr. Grayson-Wayne,” he says, as he tries to wedge himself out the door. He left a bug in the office, and he assumes at this point they’ll speak more without him there.

“Jasim,” Richard replies, sticky-sweet with his big smile and batting blue eyes. Was there not a single ugly orphan in Gotham? “All done?”

“I hope I’ll see you tomorrow,” he replies, and then Richard presses closer, not letting Jasim leave. Jason’s eyes are now on this, too. “Sir.”

“Oh, Dick is fine,” Richard replies. “I forgot to ask: did you have fun at my party the other night?”

“I was working,” Tiger responds.

“All work and no play-”

“For God’s sake, Robin, let the man leave already,” Jason snaps.

Richard backs off. “I’ll see you tomorrow,” he says with a smile.

Tiger wants nothing more than to get home and wash himself off and possibly take the coldest shower known to man. If they could fly water straight from the Antarctic Ocean to Gotham, it would still not be cold enough. 

He gets halfway to his flophouse when his car hits a red light, and a pack of what Tiger knows he should not describe as _youths_ (but will anyway) surround him in blue and black motorcycles. They have blue and black jackets, and helmets, all tattered to various degrees of what Tiger assumes passes for _cool_. One of them, his face covered, raps on the window of Tiger’s car.

They’re the Nightwings.

The gang was always known for its speed and fearlessness. Rumor on the street is that they formed years ago because Bruce Wayne wanted a faster, more nimble gang of enforcers to harry the banks, especially the armored cars. They occasionally stood up cars like this - surrounding them and robbing the owners. 

Tiger doesn’t have anything worth robbing, not really, except for his guns and he won’t actually let them have those. His car is not precisely a piece of shit, but it’s not a tricked out Spyral vehicle, either. If they were to strip it for parts they would find nothing except the bones of an American car not worth its weight in steel. 

He ignores the knocking.

The light turns, and he would go, except he’s surrounded, which includes in front. Someone behind them honks their horn and yells _give them what they want so we can go home, asshole!_ , which is evidence, in Tiger’s opinion, that everyone in Gotham City is suffering from some intense form of Stockholm Syndrome.

Tiger cracks the window around a quarter inch, and the leader presses their helmet against the crack. “You have to turn here and come with us,” they say.

“You are truly incompetant,” Tiger offers, as if to counter.

There is silence, and Tiger raises a hand to show. Look. He’s signaling the turn. The leader gives a command with a hand, and they all turn, and now Tiger is being escorted to-

-oh, terrific. A garage.

He knows he should be afraid. Right now, because of the two men he left alone in the club, he is uncomfortably aroused and it makes him crankier than usual. So being afraid is like an afterthought, a _I know I should be but can’t bother to make my body do that_.

He slams out of the car, and the Nightwings all get off their bikes. “What do you want?” Tiger growls.

They are doing confusing circles around him, the black and blue starting to blend in distressing ways, but Tiger is a trained spy and operative, and he’s in no mood for childish games. Jasim does not have a gun. Jasim does not like violence. Tiger is getting very tired of Jasim.

“Boss says you need to have a dose of fear,” the leader says, and Tiger is about to bark a laugh when one of them moves-

-there isn’t a fight. It’s a literal spray of gas, and Tiger is suddenly-

-fear is a part of his job. Fear is a part of his life, fear is a part of who he is. Spyral is not fear, they are not that kind of organization, but he thought he understood it. The fear of being trapped under rubble while insurgents destroy a city around you. The fear of falling out of a plane with a parachute that might work, if this was 1972. The fear of getting caught by the Al Ghuls, who have no mercy.

The fear, suddenly, of being alone, of his mother not returning. It slams into him like something primal. The fear of his father coming home. Or the fear of his father never coming home. The fear of being a child on the streets of a city ravaged by petty wars and petty men. The fears of childhood, of submission to something other than God.

Something black and blue and monstrous, some kind of bird, pats his face. “That’s the stuff, isn’t it?” it says, but it doesn’t have a beak or a mouth, just a bulbous head, and Tiger realizes he’s on the ground, pushing away from it. It laughs, and the sound is like the slam of bombs against caving-in buildings. It sounds like what he thinks death must sound like.

Someone is screaming.

Someone is him.

Lights are on, there’s noise, and Tiger is crawling under his car. There are monsters there too, though, and he feels like the whole world is dismantling around him. He thinks he can hear his mother sobbing. He thinks he can hear the sound of a mountain falling on him. There is something in his mouth-

-someone is grabbing him and he’s lashing out. He smashes their face, but there’s no finesse, and he sees black and blue and he sees someone’s face, only the features-

-it’s not a person, it can’t be a _person_ , but it is binding him and pushing him down, and he thinks he passes out. Someone is screaming.

Someone is him.

He wakes up, and he’s in a very nice bed, in a very sleek, modern looking bedroom. He’s slick with sweat, and he’s still-

-he does a check. He’s wearing his shemagh, still. His earpiece is still in. He’s dressed, sticky and disgusting, but the clothes are his. He hands are sticky with blood, and his hands are covered in scratches. His upper arms are covered in scratches. 

Next: his location. A modern bedroom, expensive. The furnishings are custom, clearly, and made for the space. All the light is recessed. The decor is sparse, but tasteful. He’s high up, he can see from the floor to ceiling windows, which are tinted slightly in a way that Tiger knows is custom, that if he wanted light to flood in, it would.

He does not know where he is.

He gets up, slowly, and a moment later the door opens just a crack. “Oh,” Jason says. “You’re awake.”

“What happened?” Tiger asks, his eyes fixed on Jason’s form as he comes in the room. He has a towel.

Jason scowls. “The Nightwings thought they could play with you. I found you under your car. I brought you here.”

Tiger feels like his brain is putty, but he takes this moment to start analyzing that statement. “Why me?”

Jason shakes his head. “I don’t know,” he says, and it doesn’t sound entirely like the truth. “I brought you a towel, you can shower if you want.”

What Tiger wants is-

-honestly, after that nightmare, after seeing those things and hearing those things, what he wants is to go home. Not to his flophouse, but to whatever home might be. He wants the pure comfort of Matron’s girls being noisy, irritating creatures, and subpar English tea. 

But he doesn’t want his flophouse right now. “I need-”

Jason shakes his head. “Don’t say to go, Jasim.”

He looks at Jason a long moment, and his name - well, the name Jason calls him - reminds him. He is here for a reason, and that reason is not to be afraid in his flophouse. He looks down, like he’s ashamed. “A shower would be nice. And a cup of tea.”

Jason nods, and sets the towel down. Tiger gets up and wonders if this mission is turning unwieldy, only now he knows more. Jason leaves, and Tiger strips to shower. The water is blessedly hot, and he feels exhausted, more tired than he’s felt in a long time. It’s the adrenaline, he knows, manufactured too strong too fast. He stays in the water a long time, the pressure divine, and goes over what he knows.

One: Allegra Madden died because of something regarding the family, only Jason was either not aware, or he knew but felt guilty enough to pay respects; certainly to send flowers.

Two: the Nightwings attacked one of Jason and Richard’s employees. They were one of Bruce Wayne’s most visible gangs; the Wayne family employees might get light hassling from them, if they were in the respectable businesses, but generally they were left alone from anything more than harrying in their cars.

Tiger turns the water off, dries off. Jason left clothes, clean and slightly too big for Tiger, but clearly new, unworn, and a shemagh that doesn’t belong to Tiger. He must have sent for some.

Three: Jason Wayne is needier than he looks.

He gets dressed, and begins to think of his next move.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Actual questions I asked myself this week: does masturbating ferociously over Jason Todd merit a rating change?
> 
> Direct all comments (sorely loved) to the boxes below.


	3. Chapter 3

When Tiger comes into the main part of the apartment, Jason is sitting at a kitchen table, a cup of tea and a world of paperwork laid out in front of him. Tiger goes to sit on the other side of the table, and Jason pushes the tea in his direction as he keeps looking over what is clearly work for WE. “I thought this was your brother’s domain.”

“It is. He just wanted me to look over some figures before we clear them,” Jason replies without much of a pause. He sets a folio down, and looks up over the table. “We generally share most of the burden, except with Damian. He’ll get there, though.”

Tiger takes the tea, and take a sip. It’s strong and hot and sweet and reminiscent of tea that he had back home. Not in England. Back home, home. He does not often get tea this excellent, so he looks up, his eyebrows slightly arching in surprise.

Jason looks very pleased with himself. “Damian is pretty particular about his tea. I thought you might enjoy the kind he likes.”

Nanda Parbat is not that far away from Afghanistan or Pakistan, so that makes sense. It is not exactly the way his mother prepared it, but it is so close as to still make Tiger feel a flush of warmth, which is-

-not exactly what he expected. He genuinely thought it would be hot and strong and vile, perhaps not cheap American tea but maybe cheap English tea.

This is neither. “Thank you,” Jasim manages into the new shemagh as he takes another sip.

Jason stands and comes across the table, then leans back until he’s half sitting on it, his legs extended a bit, his arms crossed over his wide chest. He looks at Jasim with an expression on his face that is so open that it almost - almost - makes Tiger feel something. “I’m really sorry about what happened to you,” he manages, finally. “There’s really no excuse.”

Jasim would not ask if it was planned. Jasim would barely know that Jason should be the one giving orders. Jasim would also not (probably) demand an apology from his knees, but Tiger would do both of those things, and Tiger is very tempted to do just that. He takes another sip of his excellent tea, instead. He thinks for a moment. “Do you also intend to make it up to me, if you are so apologetic that it is your fault?”

For a moment, Jason just looks at him. He licks his lips. Takes a breath. His shoulders roll in a little; his eyes suddenly look down, sharply. The moment seems to lengthen. “How can I do that?” Jason asks, his voice low.

Tiger is going to Hell. Or he’s already there, he isn’t sure which. He stays sitting, although he wants to stand, put this boy on his knees. “Tell me it will not happen again. That your family’s business will not attempt to harm me again.”

Jason shakes his head. “You’re safe from the Nightwings, I promise,” he says, and Tiger hears the difference in what he asked and what Jason can promise. He knows that he is not in control of this man, but still.

He makes a noise like a growl, low in his chest. “Then get on your knees and tell me how sorry you are.”

A moment passes between them.

That moment stretches, fine, taut, and as it stretches Tiger thinks maybe he overstepped. Maybe he’s about to get shot in the head, or kicked out. Maybe Matron will have to lecture him, Agent 1, on trying his luck, probably in front of her pupils. It will be humiliating, and Tiger will have earned it. Maybe-

-and then a miracle happens.

Jason curves his shoulders, like the tension is being released from a string, and he ducks his head. His whole body goes, then, and then he’s on his knees, his forehead millimeters from Tiger’s knee. His hands are clasped behind his back.

Tiger’s trousers are suddenly far too tight for this. He can see the lick of a tattoo curving from behind Jason’s ear at this angle, a bright splash of blue he’s never noticed. A feather. Bluejay. 

Jason looks mutinous, his mouth a tight scowl, but then he opens his mouth. There is nothing here he has not agreed to. “I’m sorry,” he says, finally, “that my family’s business tried to hurt you for no real reason. That I didn’t control them. Please forgive me,” he adds, a moment later, his blue eyes flicking up to look at Tiger in tiny, measured bursts.

Tiger should be concerned; he should be wondering what the hell Bruce Wayne did to make Jason so desperate for discipline like this. He should be wondering how much this family has, in fact, lost control of this city.

He is, instead, just so aroused that he thinks he might burst into flame. He reclines, just a little, and moves his foot to press Jason’s legs apart by nudging his knee. Not a lot. Just enough.

Jason makes a noise that’s less a gasp and more a groan. And Tiger can see: he’s aroused, too, his erection starting to push at his slacks. Jason’s eyes close; Tiger can see the way his eyelashes are practically on his cheeks, they’re so long. It’s obscene. “You have been given too much leave,” Tiger tells him “No one has taken the time to control you.”

Jasim is gone. Jasim left the room, the planet, he’s a long-faded memory in the back of some Spyral book of names. Jasim is a good Muslim boy, and Tiger, well.

He’s learned the weight of sin.

It’s the way that Jason stays there, on his knees, obedient. The way that when Tiger runs a hand through those pretty curls, he makes a noise like this is the only thing in the world he could possibly want. “Please forgive me,” Jason breathes, right against Tiger’s knee.

Tiger’s thumb comes down to stroke against the feather hidden by the shell of Jason’s ear. “Little bird,” he says, “you will have to do better than that.”

Jason shudders, a full body spasm at the words. Tiger didn’t know that this boy was so submissive. From that first moment he saw him, he’s been unimpressed, authoritarian, dangerous. But Tiger should have known. He’s trained to see it; the way that he defers to his brother. The way he stands, quiet, at attention. He’s a dangerous man, yes. But he’s a dangerous man who has been taught to be second.

He is not the one that Tiger needs to keep in his sights; he was right from before he got here. It was always Richard.

But it doesn’t matter now, either. Jason is giving him this look, his eyes bright, his mouth half open. “I’ll blow you,” he says. “If that’s what you want.” He presses his face against the inside of Tiger’s knee.

“If there is a man on this planet who can say no to such a pretty offer, it’s not me,” Tiger says, low and desperate. He moves his hands, to tug the ridiculous pants that Jason bought him out of the way.

Which is why that’s the moment that Jason’s phone buzzes. 

The buzz is loud, too, humming as the phone dances over the table. Tiger looks at it, and so does Jason, and Tiger backs the chair up. There’s this, and then there’s work, and one is far more important than the other, no matter how much Jason’s mouth may make him think otherwise.

Jason reaches over, then, the submissiveness gone from his posture even as he stays on his knees. He answers the phone, which means that it actually is important.

Jasim is back. Tiger gets up, pulls his pants on. Jason is standing up. “Hold _on_ , I’m going into the other room,” he says. “Because I have a guest, that’s why,” he adds, rolling his eyes, and then he’s gone, into another room, and Tiger cannot hear a single bit of his conversation.

Tiger finishes his tea, and a few minutes later, Jason comes out of the room. He looks put together now, a leather jacket and a scarf on. “Do you want a ride back to your place?” he asks, and the game is over.

Jasim shakes his head. “I’m heading to work,” he points out. He’s wearing nothing that belongs to him, and hopefully the merry band of morons won’t notice. “I can walk.”

“No, I’ll drive you over,” Jason offers. “I have to take my car anyway.”

The car is enormous, and Jason drives him. Before Jasim gets out of the car, Jason stops him. “Hey,” he says, those bright blue eyes practically lighting up. “We should continue that, sometime.”

Jasim only manages to turn his lips up in the barest smile.

~~~~~

It’s Timothy that Jasim meets first. He’s at the bar, looking like he’s in a bit of a sulk, but he lifts his head when Jasim greets him with a polite, “Mr. Drake-Wayne.”

“Mr. Khan,” Timothy replies. “Would you mind a gin and tonic, please?”

Jasim makes the drink, even though he’s at best a passable bartender; it’s not what he was hired for. He passes the drink over, and Timothy catches him. “Did Jason bring you?”

He must have been the one on the phone. It’s better, Tiger presumes, to not lie. “Yes,” he answers, then. 

Timothy makes a hm noise. “You do a good job with the numbers,” he says. “It’s been an impressive turnaround.”

Turnaround? Jasim just gives a slight nod. “Thank you,” he mutters, careful.

“Do you want to move into WE?” he asks, then, swirling his straw a bit.

“I am not really a businessman,” Jasim answers, “I am doing well enough here.” Nose Ring takes this moment to arrive and immediately take a photo. Jasim makes a noise, and Nose Ring frowns, but makes a show of deleting the photograph.

Timothy laughs a little. “You’re a ringmaster,” he says, fondly. He picks up his drink, and heads into the office. Jasim looks as he goes, but then turns back to his usual tasks.

The rest of bartenders are in fine form when they all arrive; they spend half of the stand up meeting chattering about some internet meme, and Tight Pants, in all the glory befitting the single braincell that they share, drops a bottle of seltzer on Jasim, soaking him to the skin. There’s a flurry of activity as every single one of them - all five of them - are pressing towels against him, and Tiger is relatively sure they are lingering particularly long on his biceps and thighs.

“You are all animals,” he snarls, and they titter like birds. “Hands off!” 

They do not flee, instead continuing to pat him down, until he swats all of them away. He rolls his sleeves up, and Tight Pants looks around, mutters “you’re welcome,” like a lunatic, and goes back to what he was doing.

A moment later, there’s Richard. “Jasim!” Richard greets him, brightly, as he comes down from his office and onto the floor. Timothy follows with a measured expression on his face; he watches this carefully as Richard turns on the charm.

“Mr. Grayson-Wayne,” Tiger responds, less brightly, because there is no frying pan and there is no fire. Tiger is a frog boiling in a pot, and all of Gotham is the water. 

Richard takes him by the arm, and leads him out onto the floor. Tiger notices the barstaff immediately abandon whatever work they were pretending to do to stack themselves like particularly vapid bowling pins against the bar. “You,” he says, brightly, “can help me win a bet.”

This man is absurd. How is it possible he controls all the crime in Gotham? “I do have work to do,” he tries, pathetically, even though the work he should be doing is this, cultivating this relationship, not making endless budgets that never seem to be used. This club is for laundering money and selling drugs and everyone involved except the bartenders know it. “And I am soaked.”

Richard waves it off. “You’re not that wet. Help me win this bet, please?”

Jasim does not sigh, but it’s close. “What is the bet? Does it involve your high wire? I refuse to go up there.”

“No, no,” Richard replies. “Duckling told me he hid a bunch of things around town. Like a scavenger hunt. He wanted to cheer me up,” he says, looking slightly bashful. As if this man needs cheering up. “Come with me? I invited Jason,” he says, a rare show of respect, using the man’s name, “but he said he had work.”

“I also said I have work,” Tiger points out.

“Yes, but you work for me,” Richard replies, sweet as poison, wrapping his arm around Jasim’s. “So I say you should take a paid day off to spend it with me.”

“Robin,” Timothy says with a bit of a forced laugh. “You really want to take him?”

“Yes,” he replies, firmly. Timothy shrugs a little. 

Jasim sighs. “Give me ten minutes to put on a dry shirt and reinforce what the barstaff should be doing, or Heaven knows, they’ll all spend the entire time picking lint out of their navels and putting it on Snapgram.”

“Snapgram isn’t a thing,” Richard replies with a laugh, but lets Jasim go. As he moves, he watches Timothy come close, and Richard laugh as he’s told something, watches Richard shake his head and look at Jasim like he’s hungry, all before Timothy leaves.

Tiger goes and instructs the pinheads on their tasks for the day, and Tight Pants has the courage to tell Jasim to _aim high and go for it_. They have the shared intelligence of a particularly stupid rat, but Tiger has to admit that they are all the braver for it.

The first part of the scavenger hunt is mostly through the more upper-crust parts of Gotham; Richard is strolling with the confidence of a man who owns these streets. They go into bars and restaurants, fancy shops, a bakery with the kind of sweets in sticky pastel colors that makes Tiger’s jaw ache just from looking at it. Every place with a clue, every clue met with a new treasure - a scarf in an eye-searing shade of green with a stripe of red and yellow that is placed around Richard’s throat by the reverent hand of the shopgirl, a box of light-as-air confections, a laugh as he throws his arms around a woman that they meet for dinner (Donna, her name is Donna). Everything about this game is designed to catch the attention of a billionaire with too much time.

The problem is that at every venue - every single one - Richard finds a reason to touch Tiger, to wrap himself around him. He is Gotham’s darling playboy, now that Bruce Wayne is dead, and girls flock to him, but he can’t stop taking Jasim’s hand and batting his big blue eyes at him. “You are making a scene,” Jasim tells him, as they finish lunch and Donna gets into a sleek sports car to drive away.

Richard’s arm is warmer and quicker than any serpent, and twice as grasping, as he wraps it around Jasim’s. “Mr Khan,” he says, his voice nice and low, “would you rather this be private?”

“I highly doubt you really wish to spend any time at all in private with me,” Jasim contends, trying to tug on his arm to pull away.

Like some kind of terrible monster from the abyss, Richard’s arm gets tighter. “Why not? You spend so much time along with Bluejay - with _Jason_ ,” Richard says.

“Mr. Wayne and I work together,” Jasim replies, as he’s pulled down the street to Richard’s absurdly ostentatious vehicle.

Richard tugs at him a little. “Well, you could work with me,” Richard says. “I pay better than Jason does, anyway.”

“Mr.-”

“ _Dick_ ,” Richard replies.

“- _Grayson-Wayne_ ,” Jasim finishes. Jasim is flustered. Tiger is aroused, partially because even a blind man would see how beautiful Richard is, but also because Jason riled him up but he didn’t get to finish. “You do not have to be jealous.”

There is a pause, and Richard’s eyes flick down a little, then back up. They’re so _blue_. If Tiger weren’t so distracted, he might parse that look, but as it is, he’s far too distracted. “Dick,” Richard says. “Come on. I know you can do it.”

Tiger feels a lance of true, pure pain down the center of his frontal lobe. He thinks he’s getting infected with stupidity. This is what it must feel like. “I would rather not.”

“I think you should,” Richard replies. “Grayson-Wayne is a very stuffy mouthful. I wouldn’t even go with it, except that I don’t want to lose my family’s name.” He pushes Tiger back on the car. “Jasim,” he says, smiling. His smile could move mountains. “Try it, and I’ll let you go.”

“Please,” Jasim says, even though Tiger wants to growl. Why is one brother so malleable - on his knees, pressing his head against Tiger’s knee and so _good_ \- and the other clearly an agent of Hell?

That was not the correct thing to do. They are in the middle of the street. Richard’s eyes are fixed on Jasim, his fingers playing with the end of his shemagh. People are _looking_. “You know I have a very fine reputation.”

“You wouldn’t want to ruin it with an old man like me,” Jasim tries. “People will talk.”

Richard laughs, one leg pushing Jasim’s apart with an elegant simplicity that Tiger thinks, when he writes his report of this mission, he will struggle to leave out. Perhaps he will just tell Matron that Richard molested him in the street with a pair of youths to hold Jasim down, instead of the truth, which is that Richard barely moved his expensive shoe and Tiger did as he was bid. “Only because they’d be jealous, Mr. Khan. Say my name, and I’ll let you go.”

It feels like ten years ago that Tiger had Jason on his knees, and he was the one nudging legs apart. And maybe that - the druggedness of this, the way that Richard is looking at him, the way that Tiger is lightheaded, all of that makes his decision making just plain terrible. “Robin,” he says, finally, in a low, heady growl.

Richard reels back, his mouth open, his eyes wide. But he recovers quickly, his shoulders coming up, his smile different, now. It’s not playful and sweet anymore, it’s slyer, the smile he had for the briefest moment coming down off the trapeze. _You’re so thick_ , he had said, then. Or was it _thicc_?

That’s not what he says now. “Oh,” he laughs. “You’re going to regret that.”

Jasim turns and opens the door to the car, his face on fire. There are things he wants, but what he wants is to turn this boy over on his knee. Richard gets in the car, right in the driver’s side. Jasim closes the door. Richard inclines his head, just a touch, to the passenger side.

Jasim knows what he’s being told. 

He gets in.

When he was driving Jason to God-only-knew-where, he was not afraid. He was annoyed, and he was prepared, but he was not afraid. And he is not precisely afraid now. But there is a part of him - a very large, very prominent part of him - that acknowledges that _not precisely afraid_ is not the same as _not afraid at all_.

Where he drives them: back to the Circus.

The night is just starting, even though it’s almost nine in the evening. There are people there, but they are either decidedly uncool, or scoping out prime seats before the night gets really active in an hour or so. The bartenders are, remarkably, doing their jobs, and Grayson-Wayne greets every single one of them with a smile and their names.

And he leads Tiger to one of the break rooms by the hand, refusing to let go the entire time. There are squeals coming from the bartenders, and Tiger knows that he’s going to get another call from Matron about another trending picture on twitter. He is a _spy_. He’s just glad he managed to instill a true terror of them taking pictures of his face, and even that was more about lies about his fictional mother in Islamabad and some nonsense about how it would truly disappoint her than any real fear of him.

When they get into the break room, the one with the couch that Tiger does not like to sit on because of _exactly this reason_ , Richard nudges him by the hips. “You are in so much trouble,” he tells Jasim, his fingers playing a brilliant melody against his waist. 

Tiger tries to wiggle away. He doesn’t manage it. This mission has gone pear shaped. He needs extraction _now_. “Do you wish for an apology?” Jasim asks, even though Tiger would rather eat his own tongue. 

Richard laughs. “No,” he tells him. “But I think you want more from me than you’re letting on.”

The problem is: that’s not _untrue_ , even if what Tiger wants is to understand exactly what is keeping the Wayne crime family together. Jasim lifts his head just a little, and his mouth firms in a line. Richard is pressing him down, and then he’s on the couch and Richard is in his lap.

He’s straddling him and he’s all that Tiger can see. He thinks all of his senses are burning out, tuning in. “But see,” Richard says, his smile like the sun, “you called me _Robin_.” Tiger almost stands, but Richard presses him down, running a hand down his front. “So now you’re _mine_ ,” he adds, leaning down a bit. “Do you understand?”

Tiger thinks that all the air in the room has been jettisoned away. “I-” he starts.

That isn’t what Richard wanted. His smile doesn’t fade, but his fingers find their way to the top of Tiger’s slacks. “Do. You. Understand?”

“You are an insufferable boy,” Tiger snarls. Richard’s hand is over his cock, possessive, his hand is inside of his slacks, squeezing, firm. To say that he feels owned is an understatement. “Yes,” he gasps, finally. “I understand.”

“What do you understand?” Richard asks. “Pretend I’m one of the very stupid bartenders. Say it in a full sentence.”

“I belong to you,” Tiger says, and the worst part is that he thinks it might be true. This man has wormed his way into his system like a drug, and he did it in less than twelve hours. He tips his head up. “Please let me go.”

“No,” Richard says. “You called me _Robin_. I want you to say it again.”

“Robin!” Jason snarls, from behind them, and suddenly Richard is off Jasim and suddenly Tiger is Jasim again and suddenly this mission feels even more tenuous. 

Richard looks positively smug. “Bluejay,” he says, sweetly. 

Jason’s mouth firms into a line, and he snaps, “I’ll take care of it,” before he turns on his heel and is out of the room. The color drains from Richard’s face, and Jasim is forgotten. He follows, saying something in Romani.

Jasim is left alone.

Tiger takes a moment, and then he’s walking through the halls. He can’t find them; he thinks for a long moment that he might have to just finish his night.

He turns the corner when he sees them. They’re on a platform, one that looks over the dance floor, but it’s angled so that no one can see them unless they’re in the staff hall, and they likely can’t see Tiger.

And even if they could, they’re not paying attention. Jason has his hands on Richard’s hips; Richard’s head is tipped up just a little. They are perfectly intimate, and Tiger can’t hear what they’re saying, but it doesn’t matter, because they have that look to them. That look like the world around them barely matters, like the world around them doesn’t exist. Jason’s mouth is softening, and Dick is smiling, his fingers against Jason’s jaw.

And then Jason kisses him, and Tiger feels his jaw tense. The submissive boy from just - amazing, was it just earlier? This day has felt impossibly endless - has disappeared. He kisses Richard like he’s establishing ownership. 

Richard’s fingers go into Jason’s curls, and his whole body screams _desire_ , from the curve of his back to the way his mouth opens, automatically. They touch each other with the familiarity and intimacy of old lovers. This isn’t some new thing. They’ve done this before.

Tiger suddenly gets it.

Tiger feels all the air rush back into his body, and something suddenly makes _sense_. He starts to rush, then. “Matron,” he says, tapping his line. “I need extraction _now_.” He moves, almost at a run, because he can’t let anyone hear his heavy footsteps. 

Helena’s voice is clear as a bell as he rummages through the room. He’s pulling bugs from the desk - he grabs a gun. “Were you made?”

“It hardly matters, I need you to extract me now.”

“Agent 12 is an hour out, on their way. Get to the extraction point in the Narrows,” he hears, as he makes his way down the club and across the dance floor. He sees his tumbling idiot bartenders and they’re clearly making a mess, but that’s not Tiger’s problem anymore.

Tiger’s problem, in fact, manifests the moment that the door opens and someone grabs him by the back of the head, and tries to slam it into a wall. Surprisingly, it’s not Jason; it’s a woman, very tall, with absurd hair that Tiger reaches to grab. She manages to dance her hair out of his grasp, and then she’s twisting. 

Tiger manages to get a good look at her, then; she has a tight red leather jacket on, and somehow it doesn’t clash with her hair. She doesn’t give him any time before she’s punching, and it’s pure instinct honed from years of training that gets Tiger out of the way. He has his gun up, but just as he’s shooting someone grabs his arm from behind, and the shot goes wild. He twists and his elbow connects with someone’s side, and he catches another glimpse of red.

The only thing that Tiger knows after that is that he’s fighting off instinct. The team that’s on him is very good, and it’s not luck that keeps Tiger in the fight for a few good minutes. He tries to make a break for it, once, then again, but both times they catch up after a minute. 

Finally, someone huge - so big that Tiger doesn’t quite get a good look of him - yells, “Me am done!” and suddenly Tiger’s head is covered by a bag, and his weight is off the ground, and he thinks-

-sweet merciful Allah, he’s going to die like this. He knows it. He feels the whoosh of air, and he goes limp and still, because he may not know what flying under one’s own power is like, but he recognizes the sensation from _falling_ under his own power.

He does not like this.

He does not like this _at all_. He thinks he passes out a little.

It’s only minutes before they land, and he’s tied up, his arms over his head, and his head is still covered, his toes barely on the ground. This is humiliating; he’s the finest operative in Spyral, and he didn’t see any of this coming. He didn’t imagine the Red Hoods had a meta. He didn’t think they would be able to bring him down. That was the first stupid thing he did. He hopes it’s the last, but at this point, he doubts it. He goes over everything that happened on this mission, every last part of this misery, and tries very hard to not fret. Helena is not in his ear, but he knows she must be there, waiting for him to say something.

Time passes; he can hear whoever it is that carried him shuffling around, but he doesn’t . He can hear people speaking. “Boss hasn’t called,” says a man’s voice.

“Does he know that this man is not _just a bartender_?” a woman asks. “If he were just a bartender, we would not have needed Bizarro.”

“Listen, I didn’t ask Conner when he asked-”

“Since when do we take orders from _Conner_?” the woman asks.

Tiger just listens. His brain is moving, fast, but not fast enough. He knows something is wrong but he cannot place it, but he also knows that this was always going to be how he ended up, from the first moment he wedged himself, unwittingly, between Jason and Richard. 

The man sighs. “It wasn’t an order, Arty, it was a _request_ , you know, like a _favor_?”

Someone else interrupts. “And it wasn’t for Conner. It was for me, Artemis.”

It’s Timothy. Even without seeing him, Tiger knows, Tiger recognizes his voice. “Thank you,” Timothy says, “Now unhood him.” He sounds like he’s in the boardroom, like he’s waiting for stock numbers, not like he’s about to kill a man for spying.

The woman doesn’t reply, but a moment later the hood is off Tiger’s head. “Hello,” Timothy says, looking up at him. 

Tiger doesn’t reply. He takes a moment, instead, to take in his surroundings. A low ceiling, a warehouse, industrial cleanup facilities, and-

-oh.

He isn’t hanging from a pipe. It’s a meathook. “This is a bit of a stereotype, Drake,” he snaps. 

The woman - Artemis - is gone now. All that’s left is Drake-Wayne, a redheaded man who is worrying his bottom lip, and a tall, well-built dark haired man with an absurdly trendy haircut. 

Drake-Wayne doesn’t seem phased. “It’s a stereotype for a reason. Easy cleanup, no one looks twice at someone covered in blood coming out of a meatpacking factory. Plus,” he adds, tipping his head. “I own the building.”

“Yes, I am very afraid.” Tiger says, his voice flat, although he is afraid. He wonders if Matron is listening in. He hopes she is. He hopes an extraction team is coming. “Is this what you did to Allegra Madden? String her up?”

Drake-Wayne looks unbothered. “No,” he says, flatly. “Are we going to have an interrogation where you ask me a bunch of questions I don’t answer? Because those are really boring, and if that’s how we’re going to play it, then I might as well let Conner kill you, and save me the time. I’m only halfway interested in what you’ll say.”

The redheaded man who Tiger fought earlier looks between Tiger and Timothy, and he leaves the room, too. Timothy barely looks, but Trendy-ugly-hair stops him and they have a low conversation in the background. Tiger looks at Timothy, flatly. “Are you going to kill me either way?”

Timothy looks mildly interested in that reaction. Tiger has been interrogated by better, before, but there is always a game of one-upmanship where both parties have to look disinterested. He doesn’t like this game. He finds it tiresome. “I think that depends on your answers,” Timothy replies. “Did you really think we wouldn’t know?”

So far, Timothy has not revealed that they know anything, except that he’s not a bartender. Tiger bares his teeth, still. “You will have to be more specific,” he baits. “I found that spending time with _Robin’s_ bartenders robbed me of all my brain cells.”

He gets backhanded for that, and Timothy opens his hand. Trendy-ugly-hair deposits a baton in it; they turn and speak for a moment. Trendy-ugly-hair looks up, and sighs, and leaves the room, then. “Mr. Khan,” he says. “Three months ago you came to a New York meeting of Wayne Enterprises, where I met you, only I was told your name was _Bashir Maraj_.”

He’s not wrong. Only Tiger hadn’t introduced himself, and he was sure that the meeting had gone completely unnoticed. Tim had, after all, barely looked at him. A flick of his eyes, before he was gone. Tiger had been in a suit, his scars covered by makeup. The funny thing about all of this; the things that crawl into Tiger’s brain between moments of trying to figure out a way out of this, is that maybe this, maybe Timothy, that actually unnerved him. He thought for sure it would be _Jason_. That this was a game of jealous lovers. Allegra Madden, killed for sleeping with Jason Wayne. Tiger got distracted and he forgot for a moment who he was looking at. He thought he was looking at boys playing at mafia games.

He thought, surely, that this was just boys grieving. He forgot the web that this family was capable of spinning.

He thought-

-he must give it away. Timothy laughs. “Photographic memory. Honestly. That wasn’t in your files?”

Tiger does not say anything. He stares, baldly and blankly, as though he’s challenging Timothy to a fight. 

Timothy sighs. “So. Did you think I wouldn’t know?”

“You know the answer to that,” Tiger snaps, and for that he gets the rod swung against his side. It doesn’t break anything, but he feels the bruise. Perhaps this Wayne boy is just not strong enough to manage it.

Timothy presses the end of the baton into the spot, and pushes. The pain is not the kind to break a man, but the kind that promises that manner of pain, with just a little more effort. Another wrong answer. “I want to know what you want with my brothers, and what you want with my family,” Timothy says. “And if you can’t tell me, I’ll kill you, and deal with whatever fallout from that comes my way.”

“You are a rich boy who has never faced a consequence in his life,” Tiger snarls. 

The smack of the baton across his elbows is an inspired choice. The pain radiates in that way that only the elbow can manage, and then he hit again, at his knees. “You have no idea what kind of _consequences_ this family is capable of. Do you think this is the worst I can do?”

“I think you are delusional, if you think I will tell you anything else,” he snarls. Maybe he will die. Helena is silent: Matron is not going to rescue him this time. 

Timothy, Tiger knows, is not one for torture. He doesn’t have the temperament. Jason does all that work, the bloody brutal work, and Damian is being groomed for it, but Timothy is too cunning. He likes his answers by the time he gets to a person, which makes Tiger think that is what bought him time. Timothy was figuring it out before he handled the situation, a chessmaster who is now face to face with a board he cannot control.

Something changed. Richard, today. Jason, today. Tiger forced Timothy’s timetable because both of them were getting too _close_.

So the gun, that’s not a surprise. The cold press of metal against his forehead isn’t one either. 

What is a surprise is Richard’s voice, dark and cold and utterly commanding. “Put it down.”

Timothy turns, and like instinct he lowers his arm. “Robin,” he starts.

“No,” Richard says, clearly. “What did I say?”

“I-”

“ _What did I say_?” Richard repeats, his tone sleek and deadly. Tiger has to stop himself from shuddering, balancing on his toes. 

Timothy takes a step back, and Jason’s hands come up to catch his wrists. Tiger didn’t see him; he moved like he was made of darkness. He looks very annoyed, his mouth a firm scowl, his eyebrows coming down in a fierce swoop. Timothy looks at Jason, first, and then at Richard, as the silence holds. “That you would take care of it,” he finally admits.

Richard scoffs. “And what did I tell you to do?” he asks. The tension in the room is getting heavy. Timothy doesn’t look quite as hard, or dark, or dangerous. He’s rolling his shoulders in, like he’s a little afraid. “Duckling.” There’s silence. “ _Tim_.”

“Nothing,” Timothy says, finally. The word is crisp in the air between them.

“Bluejay,” Richard says, sharply.

Jason breaks the index finger of Timothy’s right hand. Timothy, to his credit, doesn’t scream. Tiger stares. Jason pulls Timothy close to press a fast kiss against his temple. “We told you,” he says, and pushes him away. 

Timothy staggers towards Richard, and Richard takes him close. “Go get it set,” he says, mirroring Jason’s kiss. “Don’t disappoint me again.”

Timothy grumbles, but nods, and takes a moment to right himself before he walks out of the room, Tiger forgotten on the hook.

Both boys look at him, and Jason comes up, reaches into the folds of his shemagh, and tugs out his earpiece. He looks Tiger in the eye, and holds it up to Tiger’s mouth. His eyebrows go up.

Tiger looks at Richard, and Richard is smiling that sly, soft smile, that smile that suggests that the world is his and everything in it, all of that, it also belongs to him. He’s named for a bird but he has a cat’s attitude. 

Tiger knows what they want. “Matron,” he says. Jason holds the earpiece. “Call off the extraction.”

Richard’s smile widens, until he’s showing teeth, dazzling and white. Jason drops the earpiece and cracks it under his heel before he pulls Tiger off the hook and tugs him over his shoulder.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> added tag: accidental sex worker Tiger King of Kandahar


	4. Chapter 4

The drive back is in Jason’s absurdly enormous car; Tiger is in the backseat as the boys are in the front, speaking in tones so low that even if Tiger could understand them, he wouldn’t be able to hear it properly. He’s still trussed up as they drive; ten minutes turn into twenty, and finally they’re stopping.

It’s a private garage, with a private elevator that they take up to the penthouse of a building. Tiger knows where they are - it’s Richard’s apartment, so at least he knows that it’s unlikely they’re going to kill him. If one thing has been thoroughly proven, it’s that the Wayne boys don’t shit where they eat.

Jason takes him the same way, and Tiger decides to keep his opinions to himself for the moment, until they get up to the penthouse and Jason deposits him on the couch. This apartment is decorated differently from Jason’s; everything is in warm tones, the couch is made of fabric and not leather, like it’s designed to be cuddled into. The art is mostly old circus posters, clearly rescued and expertly conserved and mounted. The poster of the Flying Graysons is almost pristine. There is a throw blanket over the pillow in bright, bold colors. Where everything in Jason’s apartment read sleek and expensive, everything here reads comfortable, and also expensive.

“Do you want something to drink?” Jason asks, baldly, without any of the sweet coyness he had this morning.

Ah.

Tiger is on his bad side.

Richard is the one to come and soothe it a bit. “He’s a guest,” he says, undoing the chains around Tiger’s wrists with a _key_ , unshackling him, his warm hands against Tiger’s wrists. 

“I _offered_ ,” Jason snorts.

Tiger is too focused on Richard’s hands, gently rubbing circles against the bump of his wrist bone. “How did you find me?”

Richard’s smile is easy. “Paul told us he saw you run across the floor.”

Paul? “Who is Paul?”

Richard burst out with a bright laugh. “He’s one of your bartenders. Dirty blonde hair, earring, always wearing pants one size too small?”

Oh. Tight Pants. Paul. Of course. Tiger snorts, but Richard keeps talking. “He said he saw you and he was going to go ask you something,” probably, Tiger imagines, how to do something basic like cash the till or breathe oxygen, “and he saw one of the Red Hoods fight you. Jason called them, and it was easy after that. They don’t lie to Bluejay.”

He can’t believe that one of his stupid bartenders saved his life. “I suppose I will have to thank him the next time I see him,” he says, as if there will be a next time. As if it’s that simple. 

Jason sets a glass of water down on the table. “Next time,” he snorts. “Aren’t we confident.”

Richard eases back to sit on the table. “Do you really think we’re going to just let you go?”

Tiger looks at the glass of water, and takes it, and drinks it. It could be filled with anything. It could be laced with anything. So. Yes, in a manner, he does think that will happen, or, at least, that if it doesn’t happen, that they will come to some agreement. An agreement that leaves Tiger very much alive.

The truth is that if they wanted him dead, they would have let Timothy do it. “I think we are going to have a conversation.”

Jason looks over at Richard. “Okay,” he starts, not sitting. “What’s your name?”

“Tiger King of Kandahar,” Tiger gives up, easily. He knows they don’t have it, and it’s not like it’s easily traced.

Jason snorts. “Shere Khan,” he says, to Richard. Tiger scowls; this isn’t the first time someone has made that connection, but it’s not his favorite. 

Richard lifts his chin. “What did you come here to find out?” he asks, which is a clever way of asking _why were you spying on us_?

Tiger answers that honestly, too. “My organization wanted to see if there was a power vacuum in Gotham after Bruce Wayne died. If the Wayne family still controls the city of Gotham.”

Jason snorts, and Richard rolls his eyes. Clearly neither of them are very impressed with this. “A power vacuum,” Richard says, blankly. “And?”

Earlier, the answer would have been different. This morning, even or the day before, Tiger would have said that Gotham may have been stable, but it was ripe for destabilization. That Richard didn’t have Bruce Wayne’s control over anything. That the Wayne family was fraying from grief, with each boy falling to different coping mechanisms. Except perhaps Damian, but that was only because Tiger was still rather positive that Damian was actually part demonic force.

Now it’s different. “Perhaps,” he accedes, and that’s the truth too. Richard controls his family; he plays them like they’re a fine instrument that respond only to his hand. “The gangs are clearly still under your control, even if one of them did attack me.”

Jason snorts. “As if B ever ran the gangs,” he says. 

Richard looks up, and his expression softens just a little. “It’s not that B wasn’t running things,” he clarifies, “but we’re not amateurs. And they didn’t attack you out of their own volition.”

Tiger wants to open his mouth and say that Jason got on his knees because Tiger was mean to him and he paid for the privilege, but the truth is-

-the truth is that has nothing to do with the other. Jason wants someone to discipline him because his father did and no one does anymore, and that’s obvious. “And technically two gangs attacked you,” Richard adds a moment later.

“Was it Drake-Wayne both times?” Tiger asks, boldly, wondering if they’ll answer.

Jason looks over at Richard, who looks up, innocent. “No,” he admits. “The Nightwings wouldn’t do that for anyone but me.”

Oh.

Tiger feels a slight flush of irritation. “Did they do it because you were jealous?”

There’s a long pause, and Jason’s eyebrows skyrocket. He looks at his brother, his mouth open, and then he smiles, and then he lets out a long, easy laugh. “Robin,” he says.

Richard looks _flustered_. It’s a very new look on him, and Tiger suspects he didn’t particularly assume that Tiger would come to that conclusion. Richard looks at Jason. “It’s not like I was the only one!” he accuses.

So many things, in retrospect, slot into place. Jealousy certainly doesn’t move in one direction. Tiger crosses his arms. He thinks back to the few fights that he witnessed between the two of them, and how there were always these sly looks at him. “Did you have me doused with fear toxin because you were _jealous_?” he presses.

Richard stands up and waves his hand a little. “You were a _spy_.”

“I am still a spy,” Tiger argues.

Jason sits on the coffee table, then, in the spot that his brother just vacated. “Are you sure?” he asks.

Tiger is quiet. “What, precisely, are you asking me?”

Jason looks at Richard, and Richard shrugs. “We want you to stay. But you can’t stay if you’re a spy for someone else, and if you’re a spy for _Matron_ , then we really can’t let you stay. Or return to Gotham, for that matter,” he adds. 

Jason adds, “Staying comes with perks of its own.”

“You would trust someone who arrived here with the intention of _spying on you_ , and then _turned on that_?” Tiger asks, serious.

Richard smiles that blinding, beautiful smile. “We have an eye for talent,” he says, “And you, Shere Khan, are beautifully talented.”

“You know that is from a very racist book,” Tiger growls a little, “and I am not Indian.”

Jason laughs. “The writer was racist, the book, well,” he moves his hands back and forth. “But we can have that chat, _Shere Khan_ ,” he says, with a smirk, and Tiger thinks that Jason would look very pretty over his knee and apologizing for calling him that, too. 

He’s in a real crisis, where his loyalty to Spyral is being questioned, where his entire future is at stake, and he’s thinking of Jason Wayne’s backside. Richard is leaning against Jason’s side, and Jason’s hand is casually wrapping around Richard’s knee, and Tiger wants them both so much he might explode.

This is truly some layer of Hell.

“What kind of job are you offering?” he finally asks, because the truth is-

-even if he wasn’t entertaining the idea, the notion, he would ask, if only to buy time. Richard’s smile, somehow, turns wider, warmer. “Body man,” he says, pleasantly.

Body man. To be stuck at their sides all the time. He’s about to open his mouth again, but then Richard is in his lap, his face inches from Tiger’s. He presses his nose closer. “You don’t have to decide this second,” he says, nudging his nose down to raise Tiger’s jaw, and Tiger sees Jason, who is watching his brother in the lap of another man with hungry _desire_. “We can have a conversation about benefits later,” Richard mouths against Tiger’s throat.

Tiger opens his mouth but then Jason moves to grip his brother’s hair in his fist, and force his head up. “You,” he says, his blue eyes dark, “are impossible.” He leans down and kisses him, then, and Tiger realizes that the last time he saw them kiss he was too high on adrenaline to realize how gorgeous they were together. He watches as Jason kisses his brother, and Richard responds by kissing him back, one hand firmly on Tiger’s chest as his mouth opens, as he’s licked _open_.

Tiger’s erection is pressing against his trousers for the third time today, and he really hopes that this doesn’t end the same way the other two did. Jason looks down at Tiger, and he moves so one knee is on the sofa, and Richard shifts his weight, and suddenly Tiger’s lap is full of two boys. “ _Shere Khan_ ,” he says, but it sounds more like _Baba_ in tone, and Tiger responds with a shudder.

It’s Richard who kisses Tiger first, confident. He kisses like he flies, like he’s made for it, confident, sure that his affection will be reciprocated. He kisses him on the mouth, his hands moving to remove his shemagh, and Tiger is helpless, he can’t do anything but kiss him back, opening his mouth, trying to breathe but finding that the only air he has is what Richard will give him. Richard breaks their kiss and his tongue darts out to lick his own upper lip, quick as lightning. “Your turn, Bluejay,” he says, turning Tiger’s head.

Tiger’s eyes fix on the way that Jason looks at him, and Jason drags his nose just along Tiger’s jawbone for a moment, until it’s obvious what Jason wants. Tiger growls and reaches for Jason’s chin, and forces his kiss. The second that it happens, his mouth opens, and he whimpers a little, his hands curve in Tiger’s shirt, his hips rolling just a little. He looks sweetened, then, a little more boyish, the harsh lines of his scar seeming to fade a little. 

Richard gasps a little, and laughs. “I forget,” he says, “how pretty you can be, Bluejay.”

Jason’s eyes widen a little, and Tiger kisses him again, just for that, for that openness, and for a while, it’s just that, the three of them trading kisses, hungry, kisses against necks and jaws and Tiger loses track a little, even though they are so different. Even though they are so different with _each other_ , hammering a dynamic that is unique, special. With Richard Jason is so much more dominant, and Richard is more receptive, and it makes-

-it makes Tiger feel like less of an intruder on this, because it is so clear that they do not consider him a part of the other. Like he has relationships independent of them, and also-

-whatever thought he had practically bolts from the room as both boys get on their knees, straddling his leg as they paw his trousers off. They’re almost single minded as Richard urges him to lift his hips and Jason tugs fabric out of the way, and then they’re both on his cock. Richard is licking long stripes up the base, and Jason has as much in his mouth as he can with his brother right there, and then Tiger has two pairs of blue eyes looking up at him. Richard smiles as he notices Tiger, who knows he probably looks desperate, and then the cruel creature nudges his head up. “Bluejay,” he whispers, in a tone that Tiger’s brain wants to catalog and permanently lock into what he’ll pull up when he’s alone, “will you kiss me, please?”

Jason reaches across to tug Richard by the hair, to kiss him over the head of Tiger’s cock, his tongue swiping lewdly over him as he tries to kiss his brother, and soon they’re making out, sloppy, and Tiger thinks if he is shot in the head right now it would have been worth it.

His own hands are stroking both boys, who he’s starting to think of as _his_ , on the hair, the cheeks, to try and encourage them. Jason looks up again, his eyes bright and shining, and pulls off Tiger’s erection for long enough to kiss Richard on the mouth again before he swallows Tiger down.

Richard is grinning, pressing sweet, biting kisses against Tiger’s thighs. Just when Tiger thinks it couldn’t get any better, Jason pulls off again and takes the back of Richard’s head in his big hand, presses his face to caress it against Tiger’s cock and says, “Give him what I want you to give him, Robin.”

Richard moans like this is precisely it, and in one motion, his mouth is over Tiger, the head of his cock against the soft heat of the inside of Richard’s cheek. The bulge is obscene, but Tiger doesn’t have a lot of time to focus on it, because Jason is crawling back up his body to kiss him on the mouth. The words _give him what I want you to give him_ are practically searing into Tiger’s skull; his submissive boy, his _good_ boy, who was on his knees, controlling his terrible brother who Tiger can’t say no to, who Tiger desperately feels like he could have anything he wanted.

“Sweet, merciful-” Tiger starts, and then Jason is kissing him again, and he’s coming in Richard’s mouth, and he thinks they have destroyed him, these Wayne boys.

It is not until later, until after they have drained every single drop of pleasure from each other and wound up in Richard’s obscenely enormous bed, rumpled clothes around them, that Tiger takes a moment to _think_. Jason and Richard are curled up against him, tangled in each other. They look so harmless, even with the scars that cover Jason’s body and the way that the muscles in Richard’s back and shoulders are sleek and clearly well-honed. Naked, all men look harmless, even if they aren’t.

And these two men are deadlier and quicker than asps.

He looks up at the ceiling. When he became a spy, he thought his loyalty was something easily tossed to whichever corner would show him loyalty back. He knew that Spyral would never give him that, because spies are, by nature, fickle creatures. Cats with no masters. Helena was always good to him, unless of course she wasn’t. He was by necessity borne of little loyalty.

So what he feels now is difficult to understand. He doesn’t know what to think about it.They want him. They could kill him. Their understanding of loyalty is so extreme that Tiger doesn’t know if he could conform to it. He watched them break their little brother’s finger for violating it.

He looks down when he feels some motion, and sees Richard’s impossibly blue eyes looking at him. Jason is still curled up behind him, possessive hands against Richard’s hips, but he’s asleep. His breathing is low and even. “I can practically see the smoke coming out of your ears, Shere Khan.”

“Don’t call me that,” Tiger snaps, but there’s no real heat in it. “It is not my name.”

Richard smiles. “If you think you’re the first to try and reject one of my nicknames, you’ll find yourself in excellent company.”

Tiger goes quiet. “I have questions,” he says, “before I can make a decision.”

Richard considers that, and moves carefully up so that he and Tiger are looking each other in the eye. “All right,” he says, quietly. Jason snoozes on. “Shoot.”

“Why did you have Allegra Madden killed?” he asks.

Richard, for what it’s worth, doesn’t look at all shocked. He doesn’t look offended, but he also doesn’t look particularly happy. “Allegra Madden,” he says, securely, “was in a car accident.”

“One you engineered.”

“One Duckling engineered, yes,” he admits, “because Carmine was making noises expanding his territory, and I refuse to have it.”

It’s cold. It’s cruel. Richard says it without remorse. 

Helena would have done the same thing. Tiger would have been the weapon.

“And he still allowed your brothers in his house.” Tiger confirms.

Richard shrugs. “You came here to decide if we control this city. Do you think we would allow a feud to fester?”

“Carmine must hate you,” Tiger points out.

“Probably,” Richard says casually. “But he doesn’t hate Chickadee. And he doesn’t hate the money that he’s guaranteed because of the work our gangs do to keep the crime rate down. He doesn’t hate what my family does for him.” Richard sighs a little, and looks at Tiger. “Controlling a city like Gotham isn’t charity work and community centers and hospitals. This isn’t New York. Controlling Gotham means we have to make the hard decisions, to keep the mob in line. To keep the metas out. To keep the crazies in Arkham where they don’t hurt the populace, or dead, and the cops in our pocket.” He nuzzles closer. “Earlier you said you were here to find out if we lost control of this city. Do you think we have?”

“No,” Tiger admits, one hand going into Richard’s hair. He presses a kiss against his forehead. “I don’t.”

“What other questions do you have?”

“What would you really expect from me?” he asks.

There’s quiet. “You make Bluejay feel safe. There’s violence in him that I can direct but I can’t control or turn off, but you can. You’re smart. You’re trained. You held off Artemis and Roy; Artemis told us. You clearly would have succeeded in spying on us if Duckling hadn’t seen you before with a different identity.” There’s another moment. “We need a body man. Someone to do work for us that we need done, sure, but to stick around us. Bounce ideas off. You’re capable, we’ve seen you run the club. You’re no stranger to violence.” He pauses. “What we expect. Absolute loyalty, sure, but someone who can challenge us.”

“And this?”

“Do you mean sex?”

“Yes.”

Richard looks amused. “Don’t you like it?”

Tiger does not reply right away. Instead he keeps running a hand in Richard’s hair. “It is a complicating factor.”

Richard doesn’t reply. “We both like you. And sex. And you with the both of us. And it is one of the reasons we want to keep you around,” he adds. “But we’re not paying you for it.”

Tiger looks uncomfortable a moment. “Jason was.”

“Bluejay was paying you to yell at him. That’s still part of the deal. Sex is just an extra.” Richard says. “If you don’t want it, we don’t have it. We still want you here.”

“You both made very persistent seduction attempts. Are you telling me if I were to say no, you would both simply _stop_?” Tiger asks.

Richard rolls his eyes. “Sure. We wanted to seduce you. But don’t pretend you didn’t want us, too,” he says.

Tiger can’t. He can’t pretend that, when he did, when he wanted them both. That’s so much the problem. He’s never wanted anyone like he’s wanted these two boys, for such different reasons. They satisfy something in him. “Your brothers cannot hurt me,” he says, firmly.

“How about if my brothers try to hurt you, you have permission to slap them?” Richard counters, now, and Tiger knows they’ve entered the territory of a game. There is nothing that this man can take seriously for more than five minutes. It is already giving Tiger a headache. “You also can’t slap Chickadee unless he actively tries to give you a concussion.”

Tiger does not comment that it already happened; it is far too humiliating, even accounting for the fact that he is Talia Al Ghul’s son and protege. “You will never send a gang after me.”

“Protection only,” Richard says with a smile of a man who knows he’s going to get precisely what he wants, and what he wants is Tiger.

“You will not call me _Shere Khan_.”

“You won’t call me _Grayson-Wayne_.”

“Richard,” he says. “I can call you Richard.”

Richard pouts. “Earlier you were calling me Robin.”

Tiger snorts. “I did that one time, and you nearly ate me,” he protests.

Richard laughs. “You knew what you were doing,” he argues. “Only my family calls me that.”

Tiger ducks his head. “Perhaps in private. Perhaps when I want your attention.”

Jason’s voice, sleepy, cuts through the dark. “Are you going to call me Bluejay, then?”

Richard turns, and in the dark Jason rises up to kiss Richard carefully on the mouth, like a good morning prayer. “Does anyone else know about the two of you?”

“Our brothers know. Alfred knows,” Jason mutters, sleepy. “Are you staying?” he asks, and it tugs on the little tiny bits of loyalty that Tiger thought he didn’t have. The ones he thought that his childhood and his family and his reckless, feckless youth destroyed.

He considers that, too. “I cannot be someone who challenges you if I am afraid of your temper. Either of yours.”

Richard doesn’t move away from where he is. He knows what he is saying: that would effectively make him the most powerful man in Gotham. To not have that risk, the threat hanging over his head, and to be able to tell Richard and Jason whatever he thought they needed to hear, to bully them, to push them to where they need to go without fear of reprisal, it would mean more than Tiger thinks they would be willing to give.

He wonders if he regrets saying that, as the silence grows. “We can’t question your loyalty, then,” Jason finally says, as if he knows what his brother is thinking. “We’ll kill you if we do.”

Tiger considers that. He considers Spyral. He thinks about the way that Jason looks on his knees, and he thinks about the way Richard looks when he gets precisely what he wants, and he thinks, critically, about how that shouldn’t matter at all. He thinks of how cold and miserable Gotham is. He thinks of the gremlin creature that is their little brother. He thinks of Talia Al Ghul suddenly being someone he has to deal with again.

He thinks of Helena’s laugh.

He thinks, critically, of Richard flying and the way his heart was in his throat and the way he was furious, and feeling that fury every day. He had not felt that way in a long time - not just the specific emotions, but the depth of feeling over anything at all.

Richard nuzzles closer, temptation beyond reason, his thumb brushing past Tiger’s nipple, and Tiger snarls a little. “Stop,” he says. “I am trying to consider your offer, although I would be a fool to accept.”

Richard laughs just a little. “See? You’d be so good at it,” he says, and his finger moves to where Tiger’s nipple has hardened, pressing against the tip and moving it slowly. 

Jason reaches over and takes Richard’s hand away. “Let the man think, Robin.” Richard turns into Jason’s arms, to nuzzle there.

Is this the dynamic he’s fated to be a part of? Being one of two people destined to be tormented by Richard Grayson-Wayne? Forever telling him to _stop_ and forever being ignored until his brother takes pity?

He closes his eyes and knows that none of those thoughts are true. None of those thoughts are being genuine. It is fear of those rapidly knotting threads of loyalty, ones he has only felt to himself. He has no illusions about what he is, and what Spyral does, but he always thought the fact that he held no desire to be bound to Spyral was a personal choice. 

And he has no delusions that if Helena had jumped off a trapeze she had gotten on herself and tried to fling herself into his arms, perhaps he would have let her fall.

There was illusion and delusion, and both led him here.

He looks over and sees two pairs of blue eyes watching him. “Come here, little birds,” he says, and leans over to kiss them both.

~~~~~

Gotham is cold even in the spring, but at least it is just a little less _gray_. There is no sign at all that the weather will improve but Tiger feels slightly less irritated. Perhaps it was the early celebration of Robin’s birthday, spent in sunny, beachy Dominican Republic (useful for Bluejay and Tiger to reconnect with contacts, less crowded than Puerto Rico) that helped. Robin had left early, because Damian apparently tried, once again, to murder Timothy and needed to be wrangled. It seemed that was a running issue between the two of them even when their father was alive.

Tiger had not liked Robin returning by himself, but now it was less a desire to not let him out of his sight and more a desire to _not let him out of his sight_ , colored in different ways. Before it was spycraft.

Now it is this strange, uncomfortable loyalty.

Roy picked them up at the airport with a smile. “Hey, Tiger,” he said, as Tiger slid into the front seat. 

“Harper,” he says amicably. Roy, he discovered once he wasn’t trying to kill him, was the easiest human on the planet to get along with. Disliking Roy was akin to disliking a very eager kitten, albeit one far more suited to murder. 

“Big boss said I’m supposed to take you to him,” Roy says, starting the car. Bluejay sits in the back, his head tilted against the middle seat. “Rough flight, buddy?”

“The Dominicans give me a headache,” he replies, and Tiger’s eyebrows go up. 

Tiger offers some explanation. “They wanted to change their demands for guns.”

“Ah, well. You’re home now,” Roy offers, as if it’s a consolation. “Big boss decided-”

Tiger hears it first. “Don’t say it-” he tries to interrupt.

“-to host himself-”

Bluejay groans.

“-a birthday party.”

Tiger rubs his cheeks. “We leave him alone for _three days_ ,” he swears, thinking already of the pomp and the drama and the sheer noise. “Perhaps I should return to my old life,” he says, and Bluejay barks a laugh. Tiger threatens to return to Spyral - Helena would spit on him, slit his throat, and feed his body to the girls of St. Hadrians so they developed a taste of blood before she would take him back - at least twice a week and usually closer to three. Never has anyone taken it seriously.

(He misses Helena’s voice in his ear sometimes. He certainly misses her no-nonsense approach, as well, but there are costs to his choices, and he certainly understands consequences.) 

Roy grins. “He’s been practicing.”

There is another groan from the backseat.

Roy cackles.

He drives them through Gotham, and then turns towards the Circus. It hasn’t been long - months, only - but for various reasons, Tiger has not been back here. It turns out that neither Robin nor Bluejay actually spent any real time there, as soon as Tiger was not there. The conversation about that had been rather short, with Tiger realizing that yes, he was in fact being watched as carefully as they were watching him.

It was flattering in a way but offensive in another and ended with Bluejay over his knee for being rude. 

The club is the same when Tiger walks in, and he sees the busy bustle that screams _event_. Bluejay mutters about needing a cigarette but doesn’t walk away, only goes to the bar. Everyone is clustered under the trapeze, because, of course, Roy was not lying when he said _he’s been practicing_. 

Robin is in a unitard - Heaven help him, but Tiger wants to cover him up, he’s exposed and everyone can see the shape of him that Tiger desperately wants to keep for himself - and he’s sitting on the edge of the platform with another one of the acrobats, clearly having a discussion on what they’re going to do, when Robin looks down. “Shere Khan!” he cries out.

Tiger crosses his arms over his chest, even though he knows what’s coming next. Robin does a spectacular dive, flipping in midair, and falling into the net. He uses it as a trampoline to flip, and of course-

-of course Tiger catches him. “You got in early,” Robin purrs.

“Richard,” Tiger says, grumpy, setting him down, even though what he wants is for Robin to kiss him senseless. These boys will ruin him. They have ruined him. “I hear you are throwing a _party_.”

“You only turn 23 once,” he says, pleased, making Tiger feel old once more. “Bluejay!” he announces, pleased, and Tiger watches him say hello, while Bluejay nurses a drink and gives him a look that in public appears to be cool indifference, but that Tiger knows is really affection.

They are not so hard to read.

He softens enough that the sudden commotion surprises him, and he realizes that all five of his stupid, idiot bartenders are tumbling out of the back room. It’s the cry of “ _it’s Jasim_ ” and “ _guys!!_ ” that alerts him.

“No,” Tiger says, baldly, as they approach.

As usual, they ignore him, mobbing him like he is an actual cat and they are actual birds. They pelt him with questions ranging from _where did you go_ to _is that a new headscarf_ to _are you lifting now, you look good_. It has been three seconds, and Tiger is already exhausted. 

Someone yells _you all have work!_ and they flee as fast as they arrived. Robin and Bluejay are both watching this with a measure of amusement - Tiger logs that look away for later. He watches as a woman with a buzzed blue hair harries them back to work. “That’s Harper,” Robin offers, as Tiger goes to join them. “She’s great. They’re terrified of her.”

“Perhaps she can teach me her secret,” Tiger says as he pours himself a seltzer. 

Bluejay tips his head. “Her secret is she’s not a secret softie,” he offers.

“That’s offensive, I would have killed each of them and left their bodies to rot,” Tiger snaps back, just as Tight Pants - _Paul_ \- comes over to wipe the counter down. 

Robin runs his thumb over Tiger’s hand; he leaves behind a film of chalk as he leaves. Bluejay is next, dropping a muttered, “we’ll make this party work,” before he follows to climb up the rigging too. Tiger’s heart practically goes with them, for how fast it flies into his mouth. He knows they’re safe, but it doesn’t mean he likes it.

“Oh,” Paul says, wiping away the chalk. “They do share you.”

All goodwill from his having saved Tiger’s life evaporates. “Excuse me,” he snaps.

“We didn’t know where you had gone, and Kaylee-”

“Who?” Tiger asks.

Paul sighs. “Blue Hair,” he says, and Tiger feels a flush of embarrassment that they _know_ about his nicknames for them. “Kaylee said that you probably left to go work for both of them,” he says, pointing up. “We had a bet.”

“You do know I am actually a dangerous man, right?” Tiger growls, low.

Paul nods. “I saw you fight! It was badass,” he says brightly. How are these children _so stupid_ , Tiger wonders. “Anyway, I’m glad,” Paul adds, as if he wasn’t just threatened by a man who is the left hand of the mob princes of Gotham. 

“If you won money, I will-”

“No!” Paul said. “I had money that you were some kind of spy, here to find out information on them, but no one would hire a _spy_ after the fact, right?” He laughs at himself, and Tiger is actually struck mute. “I’m glad that you’re happy,” he says. “You seemed really miserable before.”

He says that with a bit of a wave, picking up the last speck of dusty chalk as he walks back to the til, and cries out, “Steph, you owe Kaylee ten bucks!”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A happy ending? No one died? No one (save Helena) was betrayed?
> 
> Who am I anymore???
> 
> (comments are my lifeblood, please don't hesitate)

**Author's Note:**

> Apparently the way to get me to write a fic for you is to infect me with a character I only kind of cared about, make me ship him religiously, and then point out that no one writes about him even though he's really the best.
> 
> I'm eggsac at tumblr dot com.


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